


A Deep Sworn Vow

by NoeticEdda



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, During Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghost(s), Force Healing, Force Visions, Grandparents & Grandchildren, HEA, Happy Ending, Kyber Crystals, Lightsabers, Loss of Virginity, Mild Smut, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Oral Sex, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Sad with a Happy Ending, Smut, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, The Force, Vaginal Sex, World Between Worlds, but it's not a big focus, inappropriate use of the Dejarik table, levitation sex, partially canon compliant, sand, vergences
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:27:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 40,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22822522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoeticEdda/pseuds/NoeticEdda
Summary: She wondered if you could have phantom heart syndrome. It would explain why the hollowed out place where her heart belonged kept aching even though there was obviously nothing there. Just space.Rey finds herself emotionally adrift after the Battle of Exegol, following a winding path between different worlds as she searches for what's missing. An unexpected visitor enters her life, and together, their adventure picks up steam.[a little more spoilery summary]--- What would happen if Ben mysteriously returned to an emotionally unmoored Rey after the events of TROS, only to disappearagain?Liberally sprinkled with Force stuff, dyad stuff, smut, fluff, humor, angst, suspense, cliffhangers. By chapter 8, we have both POVs. These two are very horny and in love but there is a proper fix-it plot.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 122
Kudos: 130
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems, TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	1. (Prologue) Some Time In Space

**Author's Note:**

>   
> 
> 
> Thanks to [KagomeHime369](https://twitter.com/KagomeHime369) for creating this beautiful graphic and allowing me to use it
> 
> Please forgive any tagging mix-ups and/or let me know if I've mis-tagged, as my tag learning curve is not where I'd like it to be! This is a fix-it and we all know why. Hope you enjoy reading. Comments and kudos are very, very much appreciated!
> 
> california burrito-sized thanks to my esteemed betas, [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark), who started lending this her gimlet eye during chapter 6, and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja), whose eagle eyes started tracking this in chapter 10. 
> 
> come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)  
> 

A Deep Sworn Vow

OTHERS because you did not keep  
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;  
Yet always when I look death in the face,  
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,  
Or when I grow excited with wine,  
Suddenly I meet your face.

-William Butler Yeats

She knew her sense of time was changing but she didn’t mind. The rhythm of daily life that once used to ground her and keep her sane - it fell silent in space. No more tallying of each blinding day in the desert, no more relentless training routine trying to shave off a few seconds scaling this wall, or leaping across that ravine, making it back to camp for the night to break bread with her people.

They _were_ her people, her tribe and her new family, of a sort. But everything felt a bit pantomime and rote even with these earnest friends she loved. Something was missing so she left.

A couple of medics had been talking a few months back about a fighter with phantom limb syndrome. When you lose, say, a hand, you still feel pain in that nonexistent appendage. The brain still traces the same old pathways and can’t erase the series of thoughts and feelings connected to your former hand, an indelible and undeniable part of you.

Rey thought this sounded familiar. She wondered if you could have phantom heart syndrome. It would explain why the hollowed out place where her heart belonged kept aching even though there was obviously nothing there. Just space.

So space it was. She left a few messages for friends assuring them that she’d be back, that she was not running away, but she needed time. They would be facing the real and important work of reforging alliances and trying to rebuild democracy from the ground up. And there were still holdouts from the First Order; warlords and opportunists, wreaking terror upon so many systems. It was an enormous task that lay ahead for everyone. But her Jedi path set her apart from the rest of the rebels, and it wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that she wasn’t cut out to be an administrator or diplomat, or even an enforcer.

Back on Exegol, her future seemed so clear for a few moments before everything turned upside down. Now when she stretched out with her feelings, she couldn’t reach any answers. Not least the shape of her place in this world.

Out in space for days - no, was it nearly a week now? - time seemed to pass both quickly and slowly at once. Rey could stare out the cockpit for what felt like endless hours and the only thing punctuating the monotony was the occasional growl of her stomach, an annoyance but a reminder that she was alive. And the ship was much the same; steady, occasionally hungry. Eventually she’d have to check the onboard computer again to see how long before she had to stop for fuel.

Until then, she would let her mind wander. Or hopefully empty it. But meditation was an elusive companion when her thoughts were clouded with loss.

And her heart was missing.


	2. Hours After Exegol (days ago)

The return to Ajan Kloss was a blur. The Resistance was erupting with joy and relief. Rey remembered the quickening pace of her breath as she approached the landing zone. She remembered the warmth of Poe and Finn; the sweat on their necks and the salt of her own tears as they hugged her tightly. She remembered a flurry of reunions, fragments of conversations, bottles passed around, dusk falling. There was shouting and, as the night wore on, singing.

But what she could not remember was if she had actually said a single word to anybody, or if they had all been talking at once. She could not recall smiling or laughing; she could only remember the odd sensation of watching herself from a few feet away. As more ships and fighters returned and the celebration grew more raucous, she felt more alone in the crowd. It was like she was only half there. Rey found herself pulling back from the festivities, following the perfume of the jungle to the quiet edges of camp.

——

Rose had noticed something wasn’t quite right from the second Rey stepped out of that X-Wing. She’d watched as Finn and Poe embraced their friend, seeing a look of relief mingled with what she recognized could only be grief in Rey’s eyes, and Rose had a gut feeling about why. Here she was, a Jedi hero of the Resistance back from the Battle of Exegol, but Rey looked haunted.

Rose found her later, away from the revelers and the noise. She was sitting on the ground, backed up against a tree, arms resting on her knees with a nearly empty tankard of some sort of hooch the fuel techs were always brewing.

“You don’t seem like the type to miss a party… You alright over here?”

When Rey looked up, she appeared to have been returning from someplace far away.

“Oh--hello. Thank you. That’s, I’m fine. Just a bit…” She trailed off, couldn’t finish whatever it was she was trying to say.

“I guess it still doesn’t feel real yet,” Rose said. “Any of this. And Leia…” She went silent as she sat down next to Rey.

“Yes…” Rey didn’t have the words or the strength for this. The silence continued to the point of awkwardness, and she knew that Rose meant well, but Rey was unable to explain everything. Of course, it was painful for her to think of Leia being gone. But there was more to it than Leia. And no one would understand.

“And, Finn told me about Ren.”

Rey thought she heard that wrong. There was no way Finn could know about… or could he? No one knew except for Rey, no one else was on the surface of Exegol, no one saw what Luke saw on Ahch-To. Not even Leia knew how Rey and Ben's spirits were linked. She had been keeping this secret for the past year.

And then it hit her. Rey was flooded with understanding, with a truth that had been bubbling under the surface. Every look, every small victory, every time they had gotten into a jam — Finn did know.

“Finn’s force-sensitive,” Rey said flatly. “How could I be blind to that?” He had tried to tell her more than once. She felt so foolish.

Rose shrugged. “Everyone has blind spots, don’t they?” Her voice was gentle as she continued. “Finn has talked about it, that you and Ren were connected in some way. That it was getting more… intense.” Rey studied the dregs of whatever was in her mug as Rose added, “He _definitely_ didn’t trust it, but…”

Rey didn’t look up. Rose got quieter. “You don’t have to explain. I’m sure it’s… complicated.” And with a sisterly little squeeze of Rey’s shoulder, Rose stood up, dusted off her jumpsuit, and walked back to the party.

After a while, Rey downed the last of the hooch and went to her bunk, tripping on a tree root, but it wasn’t from the drinking. She was lost in thought and all the meditation practice in the world couldn’t keep her head from buzzing. 

_His name is Ben_ , she thought to herself.

——

Rey didn’t sleep that night. Between the latent adrenaline and the impulse to leave just as soon as she had returned, there was no stopping. She could sleep later in space. After getting somewhat cleaned up from the battle, she packed a small bag of things. Rey still had very few possessions, but the Jedi texts were among her small quarry of personal artifacts. A week’s worth of rations, a few credits she had collected during her travels with Poe and Finn and Chewie, plus two carefully wrapped lightsabers and room for one more.

She slung her staff over her back and headed out before anyone was awake. There were still a few gloriously drunk partiers scattered around the camp just before sunrise, but Rey slipped past them as if she were a ghost.

The pre-flight checklist was something she could almost do with a blast shield on, but she had to stay alert enough to pilot the X-Wing out of the atmosphere. Once safely out of the gravitational pull of Ajan Kloss, as she finished making the calculations to jump to hyperspace, her eyelids suddenly weighed as much as boulders. After making the jump, she immediately gave in to the exhaustion, slumping across the pilot’s chair into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	3. Back to the Beach

Each time she tried to reach into the Force, she came up empty. Alone in an X-Wing, Rey figured this was the perfect opportunity to meditate. But the Force had been a strange blank spot since Exegol. She couldn’t sense Leia or Luke--or _anyone_ \--and it troubled her.

When her thoughts turned to Ben, it was more like an open wound. _You’re not alone._ When he said those three words on Ahch-To, he was honest, solemn. _Neither are you,_ she had promised. It meant something; in the end, it meant everything.

But now he was gone and it felt like he—like _they_ —had broken a vow. Rey was adrift, Ben was nowhere, and her attempts to call any of the Jedi to be with her since Exegol were met with silence. The few times she searched the Force for Ben were so intensely painful that she was numb and spent afterward. He was gone. After everything that had happened, she was still alone.

So she stopped trying. The X-Wing was coming out of hyperspace anyway, and she had to fly it into the squalling atmosphere of Kef Bir. She found somewhere secure enough to set down and prepared to do something she had only tried once before in her life: Rey was going swimming.

Ben’s lightsaber had to be here somewhere; where else would it be? This was the place where she almost killed him with it, where she wept and screamed at him, where she healed him. This was where they both felt Leia’s death in the Force, and soon afterward, Ben followed Rey to Exegol where everything changed. He must have left it here. Left it behind, like he left Kylo Ren behind. She would scour every inch of this moon if she had to. She was a scavenger, after all.

——

Rey practiced a quiet meditation on the beach for hours upon landing, and the Force eventually led her to the same part of the Death Star wreckage where she and Ben had clashed for the last time. She had a sinking feeling when she realized how far she would have to dive into the turbulent gray ocean to find what she sought. But, down she went.

The water was bracingly cold. Rey leapt off the wreckage straight into the depths. Cold showers at the rebel base had taught her that it was better to get directly into the water, wet your hair right away and just get it over with. Even so, when she came up for air after her initial plunge into the ocean, her eyes were clouded with tears from the icy shock. She steeled herself for the task ahead and disappeared back into the waves.

Each time Rey dove, she could feel the unstable energy of Ben's lightsaber getting closer. She lost track of how many times she went under, determined to find it, but hours in the ocean were wearing her down. She might rest a while and come back to it in the morning. The sun was hanging lower in the sky and soon she’d have no choice. Just one last dive.

This time she swam farther out than ever. Her eyes adjusted to the murky depths, scanning between blown-out bulkheads and creeping sea plants, searching until there was less and less debris and the ocean floor seemed like a parsec away from the dimming light of the surface.

As she began to resign herself to quitting for the day and making a fresh start of it tomorrow, a powerful current swept her down toward the bottom and she realized she may not have enough breath to make it back up. She thrashed upwards against it and nearly broke her neck fighting to reach the surface again. Gasping for air, Rey saw just how far out from the shore she had been pulled, and cursed the stars at the prospect of having to swim all the way back to the wreckage in worsening conditions. She summoned all her strength to slip under the surface and glide as fast as possible, following the waves and the movement of the tide towards the shore.

As soon as she began making her way back to the beach, she felt the energy of Ben’s lightsaber so close she could almost call it to her. But before she had a chance to concentrate on locating it, the same strong current dragged her under again. This time, she surrendered into its pull.

The current swept her all the way down when suddenly she glimpsed, jutting out of the churning sediment, the top of a crossguard hilt. Rey’s toes only touched the bottom of the seabed long enough for her to reach down and grasp the saber before the current began to lift her up again, hurtling her so quickly towards the surface that she was somersaulting through the water. It finally flung her up into the air and with the last of her physical and mental energy, she focused her mind on a jagged outcropping of imperial steel, where she landed in a crouch and promptly fell backward with a thud and a series of sharp breaths.

She got it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	4. Guidance Between Worlds

The solitary journey back to the rebel base on Ajan Kloss only magnified how unmoored Rey felt since her connection with Ben had been severed. And as she continued to reach out in desperation to her teachers, she felt a betrayal in their silence. It seemed so arbitrary and ungenerous. Surely they could hear her, surely they were…somewhere.

She flipped through the Jedi texts as she had done periodically over the past year, reading all sorts of lore, but it wasn't exactly a set of instruction manuals. Theories and esoteric knowledge filled the pages, fragments from all the Jedi Masters who had added their wisdom to the tomes. There were strange maps and diagrams of long-forgotten relics. Some of the books were written in a lyrical style, laden with myth, metaphor and obscure references to events or legends from thousands of years ago. She read, and read, and read some more, to distract herself from her grief.

It was evening when she touched down again on the jungle moon. She landed a ways out from the base in a clearing to avoid unwanted attention. Right now, she was back to see only one person, and that person happened to be standing right in front of Luke's X-Wing as Rey was hoisting herself out.

“Maz!”

“Hello, Rey. Funny meeting you here.” The twinkle in Maz Kanata’s eyes was one of the wonders of the galaxy, Rey thought. “Have you brought me a souvenir? I hope it’s something good,” Maz winked.

“Erm, well… not exactly, but I did find this.” Rey rifled through her knapsack and presented Ben’s lightsaber for Maz to examine.

“Mmm, mm-hmm. I see.” Maz did not take the hilt of the lightsaber. She glanced at it cursorily, then turned her gaze back up to Rey. “But this is not why you’re here.”

“No, it’s not. I want to ask for your help. Or your advice. I just... I need to connect with the Jedi, with their wisdom, and—”

“And you think they’re ignoring you, yes.” Rey was not surprised that Maz had intuited any of this. She was no Jedi, but Maz knew the Force intimately. She was able to slip into a meditative state and feel the living Force almost as easily as a person might close their eyes to recall the name of a childhood friend. If anyone could give Rey guidance, it was Maz.

“I’m not sure where they are, Maz. But I heard them speak to me on Exegol, voices I of people I had never met— and I know they are still with me, somehow. I just don’t understand why they're silent now.”

Maz studied her for a few moments before saying, “The Jedi are not logical, Rey. As much as they praise detachment as a virtue, they still feel as deeply as anybody. You are a Jedi, but you are also a person. Same goes for any other Force-user.” Maz could make an obvious truth sound like you had just heard it for the first time. “And wisdom is not always logical. Sometimes the wisdom you seek is what’s in your heart, not your mind.”

“So… ease off on the meditation?” Rey asked, curling up the side of her mouth for the first time in days.

“Cheeky girl.” Maz took Rey’s wrist in her hand. “In the World Between Worlds, it is said that the Jedi meet their true and full selves; the flickering lanterns of light and dark that we all are. Some of them absorb their darkest shadows and become beacons. But healing always takes time. Give them time, Rey.”

Rey knew all about patience. But what was Maz talking about? “The World Between Worlds... I’ve never heard of this place. Is it in the Unkown Regions?”

Maz smiled and pointed to Rey’s heart. “It’s right there.”

———

Always with the riddles. The Jedi, the Sith, adherents to any of these old religions spoke in riddles and never said exactly what they meant. Everyone had a point of view and seemed to bend the meaning of their words like poetry on a scroll. Maz was generous with her wisdom but Rey still needed time to take it all in. Follow your heart, but keep up the meditation, but don’t expect anything to be logical, but be patient…

There were times when this sort of thing made Rey miss Leia’s directness; Leia rarely bothered with metaphor or mumbo jumbo. She believed in telling the plain truth even if it made others uncomfortable. No illusions, just hope.

Rey felt some regret leaving again, particularly about sneaking away, but the last thing Maz said as she ambled off into the trees had stuck with her: “Sometimes, the only cure for loneliness is solitude.” A riddle, perhaps, but one that pushed Rey to keep searching for answers.

So she prepared to head back into space, and had some idea of where she’d go. This time she’d take the Falcon. She had a feeling about it, about wanting more room to move. And she needed some kind of companionship, even if she was on a solitary journey. Poe would surely trust her with BB-8. He wouldn’t find out until she was long gone, of course, but he’d trust her. She may have gotten a couple of scratches on the good droid once or twice before, but Poe was a forgiving sort, as hot as he could run. He’d be fine. Probably.

It was another early morning departure after leaving messages for Finn, Poe, and Rose — she was just _borrowing_ the Falcon, anyway. Rey slipped through the rebel radar mesh, out of the atmosphere, and set her coordinates for a desert planet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote from Maz, "Sometimes the only cure for loneliness is solitude," is adapted from activist & astrologer Caroline Casey. 
> 
> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	5. Sand Person

Rey leaned forward in the pilot’s seat, reaching to the edge of the console to rest her chin on folded arms, and stared out at the stars. The trip to the Outer Rim Territories wouldn’t take long in the Falcon. She made more entreaties to the Jedi to hear her again, but her pleas yielded only echoes of her own resolve to stay on her course. The blank fatigue setting in was not a boon to the art of meditating anyway, and her spirit was far from whole.

She wasn’t sure why she was headed to Tatooine, she didn’t know what she would find, but it was all she could see clearly. She knew Maz was right about letting your feelings guide you; she had to trust herself.

As she sunk out of hyperspace and rounded into the planet’s atmosphere, it was so much like Jakku that she did manage a dark chuckle. BB-8 cooed and blipped in agreement.

Acting on instinct, she veered away from the little hamlets with spaceports and set down not far from an abandoned dwelling. It was the sunken design typical of desert planets, outfitted with long-defunct moisture harvesting equipment that appeared to have been picked over by scavengers.

This was all a little too familiar, both in the way it reminded Rey of her home planet, and in the feeling that she knew this place somehow. If the Force was leading her here, it must be for a reason.

She gathered a few provisions from the Falcon and decided to dig out some of the sand - decades worth - to have a look around. This was a humble place, where a small family might have made a homestead. Maybe it was a spot for her meditate on the World Between Worlds or maybe it was nothing at all. She dug nearly halfway into the sediment until evening, as a binary sunset was hastening against a cloudless sky. She could keep excavating tomorrow.

Her sleep was fitful and not at all the kind of rest she needed. Each dream forced her awake in a sweat, reliving what happened on Exegol over and over with bizarre variations and unsettling details. At the end of one such night terror, she woke up crying and calling for Ben, certain he was alive, trying to reach him. Her heart fell from her throat down to her abdomen when she fully awakened and realized he was not there. After that, she stayed up until the suns rose.

———

Three days passed with a similar pattern. Here, she could feel time moving at a regular pace again compared with the emptiness of space. She spent so many hours meditating in the suns that her skin was turning brown over the initial layer of pink from that first day, and the growls of her stomach were weaker and more infrequent.

She set BB-8 to work repairing the vapor towers using spare parts and tools from the Falcon so she wouldn’t have to rely on the limited water supply on board. After spending her initial night on the ship, she dug out the rest of the dwelling and set up a cot against the wall of the subterranean courtyard so she could rest in the shade during the hottest part of the day and sleep under the stars. The nightmares wouldn’t stop so she might as well have something to look at in the middle of the night.

Rey was growing tired of fruitless meditation and tired of waiting, yet her instincts told her to stay. To break up the routine of meditation and subsequent disappointment, she began the task of dismantling Luke and Leia’s lightsabers. Not fully— she would leave the hilts intact as they’d been so lovingly constructed.

It was the kyber crystals inside that were worth preserving, maybe for herself, maybe for someone else. But the Skywalkers were gone. Even if she couldn’t reach their spirits in the Force, Rey believed they would want her to decide what to let go of and what to keep.

After carefully storing the components of the dismantled sabers, she began to unwrap Ben’s lightsaber. Sitting cross-legged in the sand and holding the saber in her lap, she felt her throat thicken and her face warm, and after the first tear fell down her cheek, she finally wept uncontrollably. No longer a tightly coiled spring of grief and rage, she sat alone in a foreign desert and sobbed until her face was swollen and her ears throbbed from the pressure.

Yes, she would dismantle this one too. Something felt right about freeing Ben’s broken kyber crystal from its dark prison. Her decision had a calming effect and she got to work. Just as she excised the crystal by delicately tinkering, between lingering sniffles, she heard a voice in the Force.

She couldn’t make out who it was, or if it was even someone she knew. As she closed her eyes to find this voice, she felt the Force energy of the kyber growing stronger in her hands. It was somehow warm, but not to the touch; glowing and buzzing, yet silent.

The voice she heard wasn’t a voice after all, but a low hum. She held the jagged red-veined crystal and instinctively dropped her mind into a well of meditation. The more she relaxed, the less she worried about understanding what was happening, the louder the humming became. It hurt her ears—or was it even happening outside of her mind? Rey was deep in a dreamlike state, her heart laid open to the love and sorrow she felt for Ben, while the Force flowed through her and around her. She began levitating high above the little desert homestead — then everything went silent.

The kyber turned such a blinding white that it forced Rey’s eyes wide open as if she were holding a star. She descended to the ground, landing on her feet, both hands clasping the kyber crystal as its scintillating glare softened to a warm white glow, and now she heard what was unmistakably the voice of a man.

“Rey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	6. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) for the generous and instructive beta-read. heads up, rating change!

She turned from the homestead out toward the voice in the desert, when suddenly she saw his face. Her body nearly went limp with shock.

“Ben?” 

Her heart raced, legs turned to noodles, mind reeled. Was she hallucinating? She hadn’t been eating much; sure, it was hot in the twin suns, yet there he was. Clear as day. 

“Is this real?” She could hardly breathe. 

“I hope so.”

Hearing his voice again gave Rey a shudder as she drank him in, a dark figure standing against the yellow glare of the desert. He looked at her with longing, with trust. It was the way he looked at her next to the fire on Ahch-To. The way he did on Exegol.

She dashed toward him and he matched her stride, stopping just short of colliding. Ben looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, bringing them up and hovering around her limbs without touching her, wonder written on his face. She took each hand in hers, and they both gasped momentarily as a flicker of electricity seemed to light up the Force. She pulled his hands behind her back, drawing him to her, and buried her head in his chest. He squeezed her tightly then. They were nearly panting, in a desperate dance of relief and disbelief that required steadying footwork on either side.

“You came back,” Rey marveled, drawing back to look him in the eye. “You’re home.”

“You’re my home.”

His eyes were glassy and pleading. Rey felt her own tears welling up. Ben leaned down to press his mouth onto the top of her cheekbone, kissing them away. She felt his breath on her forehead and tilted her mouth up to his. When their lips met, it was tender at first—sacred, even—then urgent, until they were locked in a knot of desire.

In that moment, the only thing that existed was each other. Every question could wait. They were together, faced with a reality neither could comprehend, and yet—there was a feverish, feral hunger growing between them. They shared a silent acknowledgement, _Yes_ , both nodding, both their breaths growing uneven, kisses falling into a wild rhythm. 

Just as Rey squinted up at the suns as if to question the venue for what was about to happen, she felt Ben sweep her up into his arms. It took her by surprise, but she hooked her wrists around his neck like it was second nature. His stare was serious, piercing as he carried her towards the dwelling, to the steps of the sunken atrium, into the stillness of the afternoon. 

Rey was pressed up against the warm rise and fall of his torso as he cradled her body down the stairs. She leaned in to kiss his throat as they approached the bottom of the shaded courtyard and felt him shiver from the touch. His gaze never broke with hers as he set her down in silence. For a few seconds, they just stood staring at each other, bodies heaving in anticipation.

The next thing she knew was the rushing sensation inside her chest as they stumbled together toward the cot, Ben on the back foot and Rey pushing him by the ribcage until he hit the wall. His legs buckled outward as she urged his shoulders down to sit. He held her by the hips and kissed her hard, pulling her onto him, lying back on the mat. They were frantic in feeling each other’s bodies as they twisted and spun around, lips meeting at every chance in between tugging their clothes open just enough to find each other…

——

The suns were high in the sky, but at an angle that cast a shadow on the side of the courtyard where they lay catching their breaths, flushed, limbs still frozen in an embrace. Ben traced the shape of Rey’s face with his thumb. She didn’t know what to say, or if she could say anything at all. He spoke first.

“I love you.” His voice was barely above a whisper.

Rey moved his hair out of his eyes. A tear slipped down to his jaw.

She nodded, feeling like her missing heart had finally returned to her chest. “I love you.” 

He nuzzled into her neck and breathed against her for a while, until she felt the low vibration of his voice against her collarbone. His laughter was soft at first but grew stronger as Rey joined him, grinning. Their breathing began to steady.

“I didn’t”— he started. 

“I thought”— she said. 

They stammered over each other’s words. Then Ben said, “You go first.” 

Rey didn’t know where to begin, so she blurted out the first thing that came to mind. 

“You died.” 

His face darkened. “I think I did, in a way…”

“In a way?” 

“Since Exegol…” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand all of it.”

“Well I don’t have all day,” Rey quipped, and his smile threatened to return. 

“So impatient.” He landed hard on the last letter of the word, eyes darting all over her.

“And you’re so mysterious.” If Rey wasn’t mistaken, they were flirting. A bit backward, everything seemed, but she’d take it.

“You like mysterious men.”

“How do _you_ know?” She crinkled her forehead as she wrapped her leg around his thigh.

He cocked an eyebrow and pulled her in close. “I know,” he breathed into her ear. 

This was going to be a long afternoon.

“Just tell me one thing,” he asked.

“Yes?” 

“What are you doing at the Skywalker farm?” 

“The WHAT?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	7. Sand People

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NSFW. thanks again to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark), the very best fairy ficmother.  
> 

“Wh— This is where Luke grew up. The Lars family, they raised him. What are _you_ doing _here_?” Ben would almost seem indignant if he weren’t half naked with his pants undone, still tangled up with his lover. 

Rey laughed a little as she searched for a way to answer. “I knew Luke was from Tatooine, but…” Her confusion began to dissipate as she said the words. “It was just a feeling… the Force guided me. To this planet, this spot.”

“You set up camp here… by accident?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re catching on.”

Ben's face unfurled in a sideways grin. “You have a talent for showing up in unexpected places,” he said crisply.

“I’m not the one who rematerialized out of nowhere.” She could lay here all her life, sparring with this person who was surprisingly witty for having been so dour and broken for so long. 

“Hmm,” he demurred. 

“Can you… tell me? What happened?” Rey had witnessed the impossible, but she knew other forces must have been at work. People didn’t just appear out of thin air. 

“I don’t know. My grandfather was there… Anakin.” Ben shifted slightly and looked as though he was trying to remember something from long ago. “It’s images, mostly— There were people. Places. From the past.” He was quiet for a moment. “But then a door opened and I saw you. In the desert, right there—” he pointed above them. “You were holding a bright light… I saw you and… just walked through.”

“Your kyber crystal,” Rey said, “I was holding your kyber crystal. It was humming, or singing or—” 

“How do you have my lightsab—” His eyes widened. “That light… You purified my kyber crystal. You healed it.”

“I was dismantling it. I didn’t have a plan to, but then it… called to me. But it was something like when I fixed Luke’s broken kyber. When I repaired his saber.” 

“The lightsaber you passed me? That’s not Luke’s,” he puffed. “Anakin built that.” 

Rey let out a little sigh. This wasn’t important. Ben was alive, her heart was whole again. But whatever had changed inside him, whatever happened after he disappeared, he still resented his uncle.

Ben saw the fraught look that passed over her face and he softened. 

“Rey,” he said, reaching for her hand and weaving their fingers together, “What you’ve done… it’s powerful. It means something.”

She pulled their clasped hands to her lips and kissed his fingertips. 

“I know.”

——

They spent hours there in the dug out courtyard, but they were quiet hours. After the initial shock of reuniting, they were just two humans on a hot afternoon. 

Rey followed his scars and kissed the length of every one. The mark she left on his face had disappeared; she supposed that when she saved him on Kef Bir, it healed all the scars she had ever inflicted on him. But there were others; older, faded, a history she wanted to learn. Rey found herself wanting to know everything about him, and she sensed that he wanted to tell her, and know about her too. But there was so much love and need and newness passing between them, and it rendered them mostly silent. Just being together was enough. They had forever to tell each other their life stories.

This was the first time Rey had ever been with a man— with _the_ man she wanted for so long, as hard as she had fought to deny it. There were boys on Jakku, and she experimented like every other clumsy teenager. But she never got attached to anyone for the same reason she never had many friends; anyone could leave you at any time. It was too dangerous. 

This was different. Rey felt safe. 

She imagined that Ben must have been with other lovers, but she sensed from their Force bond that this was something else, something transcendent for him.

“Ben,” she whispered. 

“That’s me.” He spoke softly and winked.

“I’ve never… done that. With anyone.” 

His face was inscrutable.

“Me neither.” 

She wasn’t afraid to admit her inexperience, though Rey was a bit surprised to learn that Ben was just as new to this. He seemed to know what he was doing; but then they both did. Being together came naturally. She had nothing to compare it to, but it felt like… honesty.

Ben must have sensed her thoughts. He pulled her in closer to press his lips softly to her neck.

“It had to be you,” he said. “I’ve only ever wanted you.” 

She felt a warmth rising up from her belly to her ears. The smell of his hair was intoxicating. They were still partly dressed, trousers pulled back up halfheartedly and untied. She urged his pants off all the way now and he returned the favor, until there was nothing between them but her bindings. 

His body was strong and broad. _He’s beautiful_ , Rey thought. 

Ben began untying her hair slowly, delicately. He held her head in one hand as he leaned down to sweep his lips across her abdomen, his other hand gently on her hip. Her legs tingled down to her toes as he explored her body. His nose dragged down from her navel and stopped, suspending her in a kind of exquisite agony, and he inhaled deeply. 

“You’re perfect,” he murmured.

He started kissing in between her thighs over and over, as if each time he was gently searching for the warmest part of her body. Rey’s eyes fluttered closed and her palms stretched, fingers splaying out. She felt every muscle tense, arching her back involuntarily as he dove deeper and more intently, until she was breathless, quaking, seeing stars. 

She clamped her knees together and turned, a firm order for him to stop, and he did. But only long enough to crawl behind her and unfasten the last of her bindings, leaving them both finally naked together in the gathering dusk. She propped herself up on her elbows and he sat up on his knees to look at her. 

His eyes were dark and hungry as he reached forward to rub one of her nipples between his thumb and longest finger, then leaned down to taste it with his tongue as he grasped her waist tightly. She moaned as a current seared from where his mouth sucked at her directly down to her belly button. Rey never knew places like that were connected.

She suddenly felt fierce, wrapping her legs around his torso and pulling him up just short of her body. His chest rose and fell faster for the few seconds he was right up against her, his intent gaze locked with hers, until she pulled him inside with her feet crossed behind his back. His voice made a low, plaintive sound as he cleaved into her so slowly that she felt almost dizzy. They rocked back and forth, at first languid, indulgent; then fell into a rhythm that became more and more frenzied until Ben froze abruptly and looked away, trying to regulate his breathing. 

Rey seized the chance to sit up and kiss him, but he turned and caught her chin in one hand, hovering over her mouth with his. He was trying to be still but his whole body was buzzing and so was hers. 

“Rey…” 

She strained forward just enough to pull his lower lip softly with her mouth. Ben took a sharp breath. He released her chin and Rey felt his hands swoop behind her, spanning her whole back, holding her upright as their bodies began moving faster, harder. Sweat beaded up on his chest and on her forehead. She ran her fingers up into his hair while he reached down with one hand and grabbed her bottom, clutching her tighter against him with every thrust. 

He groaned as she reached up to lap at his earlobe, then shuddered when she used her teeth to graze his neck. When he lost his body to her in those last moments, he let out a growl so wild that Rey was overcome again, crying out as their bodies shook through those final few uneven convulsions, until they collapsed into a tangle of breath and heat.

“You’re mine,” she panted, holding his face in both hands.

“I’m yours,” he said, trembling, not letting go of her.

“Always.” 

“Forever.”

——

The suns were about to rise and Rey was just beginning to stir before she realized Ben was halfway up the steps to ground level. He had forgone his shirt and walked barefoot, still tying his pants as he reached the top of the stairs. She fumbled for her clothes but they were scattered all around the cot. The black tunic Ben arrived in was the closest thing to her so she pulled it over her head and followed him, stealthily.

Rey reached the top of the steps. He had only walked about thirty feet from the entrance where he was surveying the barren dunes, so she called out to him, “Do you have an early appointment, or what exactly?” He turned around at the sound of her voice, flashing the dimpled smile she had finally seen so many times over the last night. 

“I thought you were still sleeping.” He answered softly as he walked back to meet her. “Didn’t want to wake you.”

“Not me, I’m not sleeping,” she sang as she reached up to kiss his chin. He clasped his hands around the small of her back. 

“Good morning.” His voice was low and slow and quiet as he pressed his lips to her forehead. “Nice shirt.”

“Thanks, I got it off some man. Have I ever told you I was a scavenger?”

“No, tell me,” he said, kissing her ear, her jaw.

“Well, I lived most of my life on Jakku,” she managed before letting out a little gasp at how his fingers brushed circles into her. “And… it’s very… a desert…” 

“Mm hmm?” His kisses began to overwhelm her senses, leaving hardly any room for words as his hands wandered down her backside, teasing at the hem of the tunic. 

“And… mmmdesert… very… hotmm…” She hooked her fingers into the top of his pants, yanking his pelvis up against her. “Oh, good _morning_!” Rey smiled deviously as she looked into his heavy-lidded eyes and stepped on one of his bare feet with hers, twisting it. She pulled him towards the low dome of the dwelling and leaned back on the smooth stone. She had him there in the sand as the suns rose.

——

They retreated back into the sunken courtyard before the suns had a chance to start heating up the landscape aboveground. Rey was more than ready to eat but Ben seemed unmoved by the idea of food.

“Water. Just water,” he yawned from the cot.

Rey was headed to the little kitchen to raid the stockpile of rations she had brought down from the Falcon.

“You must be hungry, wherever it is you’ve been.” She intended to feed him, however improbable his return had been. He was a big man. Large.

When she came back, he was still sitting there, making a study of her belts. Rey offered him a canteen and he drank it all without taking a breath. It made her giggle watching the last of the water drip down his throat. He acted out an exaggerated exhale when he was finished, capped off with a self-satisfied smirk. Quite the performer. _Must be feeling relaxed._

Rey went back to snacking on dried jogan fruit rolls while she waited for the portions to rise. All those heartsick days in space, all this time since Exegol that left her feeling more alone than she ever had as a girl— that was all over. By some merciful twist of fate, Ben was not only back but very, very much alive. And they were about to share breakfast.

She spied him lying down again out of the corner of her eye. His chest was inflating slower and slower, and it occurred to Rey that he might be falling asleep. She looked over and caught him the second he opened his eyes. But there was little doubt in her mind that he had just willed himself out of dozing off. 

“Not feeling rested?” She teased.

He let out a soft puff of air. “I was watching you all night.” 

Rey let him sleep.

——

The wind was picking up, the suns were approaching the middle of the sky and the sand was hot underneath her bare feet as Rey tinkered with BB-8’s repairs on the moisture farming equipment. Her droid friend was an excellent handyman, just a little short. She tightened bolts, clipped wires and re-routed the electrical relays. Some of the ports had to be scoured out from so many years of sand and wind blowing up against them in every direction, and some had to be replaced entirely. She was right to bring the Falcon. There wouldn’t have been enough spare parts and scraps to do any of this if she had taken that old X-Wing.

Rey was still wearing Ben’s sweater over her leggings. He was just downstairs, but the feeling of having him back was so precious and new that she relished every second of being enveloped by the warm cocoon of his scent. Desert heat had a way of magnifying the more animal part of a person. That secret chamber of her heart that always filled up with fire when she used to see him, whether in battle or as allies or through their bond— now it was open like a desert bloom. Every smell, every touch, every look slaked her thirst and fed her roots. 

She spotted Ben’s hair first. The wind blew it all over the place; didn’t he ever tie it back? When the rest of him emerged from the stairs, BB-8 bumbled over from behind the other vapor tower to take a look at their visitor, having been only just brought back online from power-saving mode.

“It’s alright. He’s with me,” she reassured her little friend. BB-8 did a double-take. “No, I mean it. BB-8… this is Ben Solo.” The droid’s head swiveled back and forth between them, incredulous.

“Ah, I… uh… think I’ve heard of you.” Ben smiled with pursed lips in some sort of embarrassment. 

_Bloop-beep. Dap._

The droid seemed almost as embarrassed as the man. Rey figured they’d work it out eventually.

“Sleep okay?” She asked while re-fitting a steam conduit, a two-hand job, as he wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her hair.

“I haven’t slept like that since… Hmph.” He nuzzled into her ear and threatened to upend the refitting process she had nearly finished. 

Rey snapped her head around, never letting go of the conduit fitting. “If you want to be useful, there’s a bucket of scrap metal that needs carrying back to the Falcon.” 

Ben looked over at the ship, but didn’t move. She could feel a shadow pass over his mood— not of resentment, but of deep regret. 

“Or,” she offered, “You could bring me a cup of caf.”

He nodded and Rey sensed a tacit _thanks_ before he gave her a little bite on the shoulder and walked down to the courtyard, returning with two cups. 

“One caf for the scavenger.” They clinked glasses. He made a good cup of caf.

“Almost done.” Rey went back to fiddling with a compressor. Ben kissed her on the cheek before venturing out past the vapor towers, cup in hand. He scanned the horizon and seemed to be counting or measuring something, taking a few steps forward, then looking at his feet and turning as if to try another approach. It was an odd sight, watching him retrace his steps. Maybe he was trying to jog his memory. 

“Aha! Here it is,” he said, drawing a sort of marker with his bare feet where he stood.

Ben must have stumbled on some discovery. Rey set down her tools.

He took a few steps farther out. “How long was I gone”— 

And then he vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	8. Both Sides Now

His first consciousness was of his own breathing, which must have stopped momentarily when he crossed through the portal. He had just been squinting in the desert sun but his eyes quickly relaxed as he emerged on the other side, adjusting to the absence of light. He was back in the blackness of the void. There were no signposts, there was no sage with a lantern hanging from a crook. Save for a few thin, scattered beams of light that seemed to curve as they extended into infinity, it was just Ben in the darkness.

He turned around in a panic as the doorway closed behind him, separating him from Rey. He would’ve screamed her name, but the terror he felt went beyond words or noise. 

Nothing felt like this did. Not bleeding his kyber crystal, not watching the students from his padawan days trapped in the burning Jedi temple, nothing. Even when he killed Han, he didn’t feel the pain all at once like this. All those years of Palpatine’s intense psychological torture made the horror of what he did to his own father leak out slowly, eating away at him from the inside like poison. This was part of how Sidious manipulated him, by using the power of the dark side to dole out comfort in doses. But the comfort was also withheld to prolong Ben’s suffering, rendering him dependent on scraps, always pushed up against the fragile edge of sanity. 

This type of pain was something else — being cut off from Rey was like having his soul sliced out with a laser. He had been torn away from her, from _love_. The part of his spirit that had been asleep for so long, fighting nightmares for years, was awake and safe now with Rey. She was his anchor. He could heal, he _knew_ he could. 

Yet just when he was reunited with the woman he was meant to be with, everything was suddenly wrenched away from him. It felt like the iron core of a planet had lodged itself in his chest. But he had to use all his strength to push past the pain; there was no time to waste. He couldn’t lose her again. He would move the stars to get back to Rey.

 _Focus. Just focus._ If he could remember what happened the first time, when they were separated on Exegol, maybe he would see the way forward. He had been thrown back to this in-between place _again_ ; if he could only understand _why._ The first time, it felt like barely an instant had passed before he was back in Rey’s arms on Tatooine, but he knew that it must have been longer.

He thought back to Exegol, when he used his life force to save Rey from death, when she kissed him and it felt like the whole galaxy was incandescent with their love. And he remembered seeing her face as the light faded. He was losing consciousness, just barely aware of his own existence in a liminal space. Feeling neither alive nor dead, his only sense was that Rey was in pain and he wanted to comfort her. So he told her that he would always be with her, and he meant it. He would never leave her. 

Then it all went hazy. 

The ensuing blur of memories and voices was too much to digest. He felt his mother’s presence, and his grandfather’s and even Luke’s, but they were all different somehow. 

There were images of darkness, of fear, but also warmth and goodness. He heard what sounded like shouting, and then it morphed into his mother’s tender Alderaanian lullabies. He heard the dark mechanized voice of Darth Vader and the roguish laugh of Anakin Skywalker and watched as their sabers clashed; one person split into two personas, each fighting the part of themselves they wanted to extinguish. Ben saw himself standing in the middle of a vast army, then every soldier transformed into the luminescent blue butterflies he encountered as a child, fluttering around him and carrying him into space. He could sense planets spinning, suns collapsing in on themselves and nebulae birthing new stars and new systems. He smelled the soil on a million moons, and the sweetness of Rey’s breath. It felt like he was floating in a kaleidoscope of his own life, intertwined with the lives of others, and the whole cosmos.

If the key to knowing this place’s secrets lay in making sense of all that, it would take an eternity. 

Ben’s immediate instincts were physical; he felt like running or fighting. But his impulses were only one way to deal with a problem. He knew other ways, too. And he was not going to fuck this up.

So he closed his eyes, emptied his mind, and stretched out with his feelings into the Force.

——

_He disappeared._

She shouted his name into the empty desert. She ran through the sand to the place he marked with his foot and she spun around, looking out to the farthest dunes as if he might appear casually, with a smirk and a _gotcha_ , but he was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes were filling with tears and her pounding heart sank down into the bottom of her gut.

“No…. _No.”_ Rey was overwhelmed. “This can’t happen. This can’t be happening.”

“…BEN!” She was panicked, hyperventilating as tears streamed down her face. He had _just_ come back to her. The ache in her chest had finally been replaced with joy after a year of knowing deep down that they were meant for each other. This was a blow Rey could not withstand, not after finally having what she wanted with her whole heart— his body, his soul, his love. _Ben._ Their bond was woven together now like a perfect cloak to shield them both from any storms life could brew for them. Without him she felt broken again; naked and exposed to the elements. 

BB-8 rolled out to where she stood and had the nerve to try to get her attention. Rey’s distress was all-consuming until the droid’s frenetic spinning became impossible to ignore. 

“NOT NOW,” she seethed.

The droid was unfazed, tipping its head down to the ground, repeatedly pointing at the lines etched into the sand.

Rey saw the shape that Ben had drawn with his toes. A perfect circle with a smaller ring nested inside of it, then two short curved lines jutting out ninety degrees from each other like feet. She recognized it from somewhere. But her thoughts were a maelstrom and she could hardly process what had happened, let alone some cryptic drawing Ben had left before disappearing again.

 _He disappeared._ Her shock was threatening to mutate into rage. The sand all around her began to swirl up into the air, agitated by her mounting fury as it reverberated through the living Force. BB-8 spun and whirred wildly in alarm. There was a tremor building below the ground and Rey felt her heels lift up, beginning to levitate. Her face felt hot and her body was electric with anger. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths in an effort to still her emotions and think straight. What mattered was finding Ben. It was the thought of him safe with her again that washed over Rey like a cool rain, and she relinquished her grip on the environment, allowing the empty desert to return to its natural calm.

The drawing he left must mean something, but it didn’t look like a language or script. She needed to retrace her own steps just like Ben had searched for the spot where he first emerged and then left these lines in the sand to mark it. She thought back to the first moment he had returned but then her heart began to ache remembering all the moments after that; spending hours exploring each other, sleeping through the night with him lying in her arms after waiting for so long to be together. _Concentrate._ She had been levitating while healing his kyber crystal when he came back to her. 

_His kyber crystal._

Rey opened her eyes, sprinted to the entrance of the courtyard, and flew down the steps. The kyber crystals were wrapped up together in a little pouch she had fashioned from some rags she found on the Falcon. She took the pouch and headed back up past the spot where she meditated with Ben’s crystal the day before, stopping at Ben’s marker in the sand. As she unwrapped the cloth, she could hear the faint singing of the kyber just as she did before. She sat down, legs crossed, and emptied her mind. The humming of the crystal grew louder — _it must be working_ , she thought. 

Then she saw a hazy veil begin to form about two feet away from her; a layer of refracted light hanging in the air, circular in shape and about the size of the Falcon’s cockpit, with gradient borders that melted into the landscape. It was like a fine mist had settled above the spot where Ben stood earlier, reflecting yet distorting the sand below it. Rey had seen mirages hundreds of times growing up on Jakku, yet she felt unusually drawn to this one. She wanted to reach out and touch it but didn’t dare do anything differently than yesterday when Ben appeared. As she held the kyber crystal, the air above the desert sand shimmered more intensely and the longer she surrendered to the power of the Force, the more defined the edges of the circle became. 

A silhouette came into focus on the other side. 

_Ben._

His hand emerged from the beyond the veil, solid and strong. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	9. With A Faery, Hand In Hand

——  
Exegol, Ten Days Ago  
——

Ahsoka and Anakin stood together, spirits in a world between the material and the mystical. 

“There’s no debate here, Snips. He’s full of light.”

“Yes, but that’s not the issue, is it? The question is, how does this work?” Ahsoka’s face was like a cloud; impassive if you only glanced, but the longer you stared, the more you saw. “We don’t know how this will turn out,” she cautioned.

Anakin looked at her sideways. “Do or do not, as the saying goes.” He stepped forward and she followed him, leery but committed to her friend.

They walked through the portal and watched as a young woman with three buns wept over her lover. Both spirits felt the wound of this broken bond and in their compassion, lifted the dying man’s being out of its plane of existence and into theirs. They turned away from the woman and began a sojourn into uncharted territory.

——  
Present Day  
——

For a split second, Rey couldn’t feel her body. Then the desert sun was replaced with darkness, and she felt Ben’s hand on her arm again as he pulled her through. She crossed into a cavernous black void and found herself on a delicate path of light that wove around with other pathways, seemingly stretching into infinity. But before she could ask what this place was, Ben drew her to him and clutched her against his chest with a desperate tightness.

“Thought I lost you,” he said, stifling tears. 

Rey was a bit dazed but felt a flood of relief at being back in Ben’s arms. She could hear his heartbeat as they held each other. It was the warmest sound she had ever heard.

“Don’t leave me. Ever again,” she finally said, turning to look him in the eye. Being separated again was too much for her soul to bear, and she knew down to her bones that it was the same for him. 

“I didn’t mean to…” He cupped her head in his hand and softly brushed his thumb across her forehead. "I never want to be apart from you. Ever.”

Her lips quivered and her eyes were wet, but one corner of her mouth pinched to the side. 

“Good,” she said. 

His eyebrows shot up and lifted his mouth into a smile. Then came that laugh of his. Low and soft and rumbling, usually a bit reserved at first, but always hinting at a full-throated riotous mirth just waiting to be unleashed. 

Rey chuckled with him, but her curiosity was getting the better of her, and she began looking around again in awe. The doorway was still there, but there was nothing else except distant stars and swooping pathways illuminated by slivers of light, all set against a field of deepest black. Ben watched her with interest as she took in their surroundings.

“I’ve seen this place before,” she said, dreamily. “When we were on Exegol. I was alone. You were…hurt… far away. But I saw this place, I know it. When the Jedi spoke to me.” 

“The Jedi, plural? More than one? What…” 

“Yes, so many of them. I didn’t know who they all were, but I felt them with me.” Rey could sense a bit of Ben’s surprise spilling over into their bond. And something else… a sadness, a feeling of missing out. She wasn’t certain what to make of it; he must have communicated with Force spirits before. “I’m sure you know more about it than I do…”

“No, I’ve never been able to hear them,” he said quietly. He shook his head a little as if to dismiss an unwelcome thought. “What did they say to you?”

“They told me to rise,” she said, remembering the refrain. “To end the Emperor.” It was an overwhelming experience that she had barely begun to digest.

Ben ran a hand down her arm and laced their fingers together. 

“And you did. You saved everyone and everything. You’re a hero.” 

“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be alive. Maybe you’re _my_ hero.”

“No.” His voice was firm. “Just someone who loves you.” 

Rey’s heart nearly burst as she lunged forward to kiss him, knocking him over. He broke the fall with one hand, then matched her passion with strong arms all over her. Whatever otherworldly gossamer film that supported them in this dark expanse was strong enough to withstand their bodies colliding against it. They had done it in some unconventional spots over the single day they had spent together, but here? This would be a tale for their grandchildren… or perhaps it wasn’t suitable for children. 

— _Grandchildren._ The thought of it suddenly took her breath away. She wrested her lips from his. Her eyes raced around his face, his strong nose and his kind eyes, and she imagined what he might have looked like as a child. Her stomach filled with butterflies. _Grandchildren._

Ben noticed how she froze. Something in his face said he sensed her thoughts.

“Guess we got a little carried away.” His voice was soft and tentative. 

Rey sat up, flustered and turning red from the way her own mind caught her off guard.

He propped himself up against his elbows. She willed herself to regain her composure. 

“Well,” Ben said, “I _am_ starting to remember what happened, after Exegol. Rey… I have so much to tell you.”

“I’m all ears.” 

“Hey— That’s my line.”

——  


The void was brimming with echoes of the Force signatures of every being who ever lived. You could let yourself get lost in it, listening closely with the honest acoustics of your heart to the strange beauty of everything, ever, all at once. But when Ben recounted what happened to him after Exegol, it was clear that he had lived through something even more intense, more visceral. He was _there_ on every planet; he _was_ every planet. It still might not all make sense yet, but it was coming together; Rey could see it on his face. She thought his story sounded familiar. It reminded her of tales she heard as a girl on Jakku, when passersby regaled the locals at Niima Outpost with stories about smoking sandflower root. They said it opened your mind to the whole galaxy, that it could drive a person mad or heal their soul. Ben’s story was a version of this, of being and seeing and feeling everything all in the span of a moment. 

After being thrown back into this place and making the choice to meditate, it had come back to him —most of it— and he shared his memories with Rey. She was fascinated by the visions he described, wanting to know more, asking for details sometimes where he couldn’t quite find the words. Still, the fundamental explanation for where they were —and why— remained elusive.

“Ben, it’s just… what _is_ this place?” Rey didn’t mean to be impatient, but she couldn’t help it.

“I may have heard about it as a kid. Luke talked about a World Between Worlds, but he was probably just repeating a phrase he read in a book.” His brow furrowed. “Something about vergences in the Force, connections to other times, or places… I think it’s how I found you. How my grandfather reached me, or… I don’t know. Can’t ask him now.”

It was a lot to sort through. She thought she remembered the word vergence in the Jedi texts. It was some sort of place or object imbued with Force energy strong enough to serve as a portal to other worlds. And she couldn’t forget when Maz told her about a World Between Worlds. It wasn’t just a phrase in a book.

“So you’re saying… that your grandfather’s spirit is gone forever?” Rey knew that no one fully understood Force spirits, but ever since talking with Maz, they seemed more human than mystery.

“Not gone, not really… His spirit was… like a glass of water being poured into the ocean. He’s everywhere, and nowhere, I guess.” 

“But you can’t remember what Anakin said to you, or how he”—

He shook his head and she decided not to push any further.

“Maybe you just need more time…” She wanted to help him, to ask the right questions, but she feared that time was not something they had in abundance. The doorway was still open; how long it would remain so was uncertain. 

“Ben,” she said, eyes zipping between his face and the doorway, “we have to go back. I recognized the marker you drew in the sand. It’s this doorway, isn’t it?” He nodded, listening intently. “I must’ve seen it in the Jedi texts… I think I even read about vergences, when I was looking through the books on the way to Tatooine.” 

He looked at her quizzically, but she couldn’t stop to indulge his confusion. “There are answers in those books, Ben, I can feel it. They’re in my knapsack, on the Falcon. We have to go back while the door is still open.”

“You… have the sacred Jedi texts? In a bag? On Tatooine?”

“Yes. You can be funny about it later, but let’s go now. Before it closes.” 

“When I pulled you through, I was… acting on instinct. There’s no guarantee”—

“I know. But we can’t stay here. And you can’t disappear through this —whatever it is again. We may not know how it works, but we have to face it together. You and me.” She stepped with one foot towards the portal, extending her hand to him. “Have faith.”

Ben took her hand and pressed his mouth to the backs of her fingers. She felt the way her resolve poured through their bond, how he received it and trusted her and wanted to do right by her.

“I have faith,” he said. “In you.” 

They walked through the doorway together, hand in hand.

——  
Exegol, Ten Days Ago  
——

Ahsoka and Anakin carried Ben through the veil between the living world and a cosmic crossroads —known to some as the World Between Worlds, known to others simply as an in-between place. Some scholars call it a vergence scatter while most people don’t believe it even exists. 

Anakin knelt down next to his grandson’s motionless body and reached out to take his hands. Before he could, he felt Ahsoka’s touch on his shoulder. 

“I’ll miss you, old friend,” she said to him.

“You can never get rid of me, Snips.” He looked up at her and smiled sweetly. “…But I’ll miss you too.”

He clasped Ben’s hands and closed his eyes. The ghostly bluish form of Anakin Skywalker fragmented into a trillion points of light, diffusing into the infinite vastness of the cosmos.

Ahsoka heard his voice one more time, but not out loud; only in her mind:

_This is where the fun begins._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)
> 
> The chapter title is a line from another W. B. Yeats poem, The Stolen Child [(here's a link to the wikipedia if you want to read it)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stolen_Child).


	10. Passages

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ben take a leap of faith... among other things.
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Thanks to [KagomeHime369](https://twitter.com/KagomeHime369) for creating this beautiful graphic and allowing me to use it <3 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very grateful to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for their eyes on this chapter.  
> 

_We’re safe._ Rey hadn’t let on how worried she was too, but every one of her instincts told her that the only way forward was through that doorway. The moment they returned to the stifling heat of Tatooine, the door vanished behind them. She wondered if it had been more of a gamble than she even planned; that they just made it through in time before being trapped in a realm beyond the living world. 

Both suns were beating down in their midday fury. It seemed as though time had stood still while she and Ben were on the other side. After recovering from the disorienting sensation of crossing the threshold, they smiled and embraced with relief.

“This time,” she said, “don’t go running off into the desert without a plan.”

“You're the boss.”

Rey laughed in a way that was half embarrassed, half charmed.

Ben kept squeezing her hand as they walked towards the desert dwelling in silence. They were both shaken from passing between two worlds; by risking separation and taking a leap of faith. But each was the other’s anchor, and the strength they drew from each other echoed through their bond to buoy their spirits and make them feel brave in ways they were just beginning to understand.

As they walked, they were followed by BB-8 practically nipping at their heels. When they reached the entrance to the sunken courtyard, Rey turned back and crouched down to eye-level with the droid.

“Can I ask you a favor?” 

The droid chirped back in assent. 

“Will you gather up my tools and meet us back at the Falcon?” 

_Dep. Bap-mlep._

“Thanks, BB. You’re a good mate.”

Rey could sense Ben’s slight unease once again at the idea of the Falcon. But it was different from the regret she sensed before; there was also a hint of excitement emanating from him, like seeing a sliver of light through a doorway left ajar. Maybe being on the ship would be a tonic for Ben. He had some kind of mind-altering experience on the other side of the veil; perhaps it really did heal old wounds of the spirit. 

Despite being eager for them to go through the Jedi texts and put their heads together, Rey thought maybe Ben would want a few moments alone on his father’s ship. After changing back into her own tunic and returning Ben’s, she made an excuse about misplacing a tool and needing to look downstairs in order to persuade him to head over to the Falcon with her right behind him. When she felt like enough time had passed, she emerged aboveground to meet him on board. 

But from the top of the stairs, she saw what looked like a standoff between a large man and a bulbous little droid at the bottom of the ramp to the Falcon. Ben seemed to be reasoning with BB-8, gesticulating towards the cockpit. Perhaps he was explaining something, maybe it was an apology… for what, Rey wasn’t sure, but she had her suspicions.

As she approached, she could see Ben getting more and more animated.

“I don’t have clearance? _I_ don’t? I grew up on this ship!”

BB-8 and Ben turned towards Rey in unison, as if to request backup.

She laughed at the idea of settling such a dispute.

“Ben, BB-8 is programmed to follow Resistance Protocol. You’re not on the ship’s manifest or maintenance crew, so I guess you’re not authorized…”

“Ah. I see.” He stepped forward, stood a hair’s breadth away from her and took her face with both hands, leaning down to plant a long, languorous kiss on Rey’s lips. “Am I authorized to do that, Resistance Protocol Follower?” His voice was hushed and his eyes flicked around her face. He never looked back at the droid.

BB-8 was still as a stone.

Rey blushed and turned to the droid. “Ben can be added to the visitor list, BB-8. Mind entering that into the log for me?”

_Beep. Dop. Dirr._

“Thanks, BB,” she said, walking up the ramp without giving Ben a second glance. The droid rolled behind her. 

Ben stood frozen at the bottom of the ramp with his hands still in the air where they had been holding her face.

“ _Visitor?_ ”

——

Rey was quite pleased with herself. Teasing Ben gave her a rush, a shot of something like adrenaline that reminded her of their contentious past, when they seemed to be always circling each other, prodding at one another’s weaknesses, each trying to get a rise out of the other whenever they connected through their Force bond. But the antagonistic feeling was gone now. Just a harmless thrill.

She still wanted to give Ben a moment alone. No matter how much more relaxed he seemed, she could still sense a hesitancy. When she felt his presence still lingering at the ramp, she knew she had been right. So she headed for the cockpit and booted up some of the systems, intending to let him take his time. She’d slip into the engine room soon, to stay out of his way. 

After flipping on the subspace radio, she saw thirty-one messages and holocalls. Most of them were from Poe so she skipped those. She already knew he’d be furious with her, then apologizing for losing his temper, then bargaining with her, then trying to guilt her… The full Poe treatment. She’d deal with him later. She toggled through and found the most recent one, which was from Rose. It was audio only. 

> “Rey, it’s Rose again. Just send us a message… please? Finn’s worried. He wanted to send a scout when we traced your signal to Tatooine but I talked him out of it. I know you can handle yourself. And he does too; he’s just so… protective of you. If you could just check in… It’s been days. Oh— and if you’re listening to this message first, you might want to delete the first five or ten from Poe. He’s been… you know, himself. Anyway, take care, Rey. We miss you.” 

The message ended and Rey heard metal clanging from the other end of the ship. She would have to listen to the rest later, but it felt good to hear Rose’s voice— even though it caused her a little pang of guilt. But Rose didn’t know the half of it. None of her friends did, really. Rey had been through so much; on her own, with Ben… So she hurriedly composed a communiqué marked for Rose’s eyes only. 

>   
>  “Rose—   
>  Thanks for message.   
>  Tatooine fine.  
>  Have visitor.   
>  Will holo-call soon.   
>  My love to all.  
>  —Rey”

She didn’t want to worry anyone further, but she had to find a way to explain Ben… delicately.

Rey pressed _transmit_ and headed down the corridor. To her surprise and delight, she spied Ben on all fours on the far side of the main hold. He was rummaging behind a panel he had pried open and seemed quite at home. 

“Something for the lady?” He emerged and raised his arms wide, holding a dusty bottle in one hand, two glasses in the other. His crooked smile was just a tiny bit wicked, Rey thought. A drink certainly sounded nice after the psychic toll of crossing between two different planes of existence. 

He gestured toward the Dejarik table.

Rey laughed and made her way over as Ben uncorked the bottle and filled the glasses with a liquid she could smell from across the room. He met her at the table and handed her a drink.

“Thanks, barkeep.” She brought the glass up to her mouth but he gently extended a hand to stop her.

“Might wanna hold your nose for the first sip. Maybe don’t breathe.”

“What are you serving me, poison?”

“Not poison. Corellian whiskey. Secret stash… It’ll sting your throat a little.” He took a gulp.

She defied him and swigged her whiskey without any elaborate precautions, but grimaced at the burn.

He leaned in close. “Told you it would burn.” Then he slowly backed her into the game table and pressed his mouth against hers. The whiskey he just drank warmed her lips. 

She liked it. The Jedi texts could wait.

He let out a little _hmmph_ when she reached underneath his tunic with her free hand and ran her fingers up his chest, poking above the collar and reaching up to graze his Adam’s apple. Inching closer to her, he removed her glass from her hand with the same one he used to hold his, setting both glasses down on the bench an arm’s length away, never leaving her lips. 

She felt his hands behind her back as he leaned against her, lowering her backwards onto the cool surface of the Dejarik table. 

“What are you”—

“I want to taste you again,” he whispered. Something in Rey’s brain instantly short-circuited.

The next thing she knew, he was kneeling in front of her, throwing her boots across the room, tugging her leggings off, then taking another hearty swig of whiskey. He lifted one of her thighs over his shoulder while he used his other hand to gently pry her open with his fingers. Her breathing was already ragged as she propped herself up to witness his eyes filling with greed at the sight of her. He looked up and smirked, then tucked his hair behind his ears and buried his head between her legs. The warmth of the whiskey did something entirely different down there. 

Her elbows promptly collapsed beneath her and she girded her arms against the edges of the game table. She let her head hang backwards off the far end and, as he sucked and circled again and again with his mouth, a high-pitched whimper escaped her throat.

He surfaced, kissing her thighs, and mumbled, “When you make that noise…” then smothered a groan as he plunged back in, worshipping her with his lips.

He took another drink from his glass every once in a while, and Rey squirmed with want whenever his mouth wasn’t on her. But he always returned with a hedonic fervor, and his lips delivered a tingle from each sip of warm whiskey, his tongue dragging and twirling while making her body feel wetter and hotter. 

“ _Ben_ …” 

“Hmmm. . .” he hummed into her body. He reached up beneath her tunic and pulled down her bindings, kneading at her breasts, exciting her nipples. She was flushed all over with a warmth that snaked down to her fingers and toes, and she found it a struggle to hold herself steady on the table. As if he sensed her predicament, he slid his hands back down and draped her other thigh over his shoulder. Then he thrust a hand under each cheek of her ass, holding her steady and squeezing her against him as he sucked and swirled into her harder. 

Rey thought she would faint from pleasure. His mouth felt like flames and her body a pot of water above the fire, until she throbbed from being brought to a boil.

She cried out and he slowed his pace, making her shiver with each lick and lap, until she was unable to withstand any more intensity. Choking back gasps, Rey reached forward and pulled his head up by his hair. 

She saw his swollen lips curl into a grin and his chest puff out a single _heh_ as he looked up at her. He massaged her thighs for a moment before gently peeling them off his shoulders, guiding her by the knees so her feet reached the floor again. Rey was still dizzy from bliss, grateful there was a sturdy table underneath her.

He finally stood and lifted her off the table with one arm, grunting. She had just enough presence of mind to hook her legs around his torso and loop an arm around his neck. His shirt was soaked with her body open against it, and she could feel him hard through his trousers, right under her bottom. 

Rey kissed him once on the mouth, tasting herself on his lips. 

She narrowed her eyes and gave him a mischievous smile.

“You’ve been drinking on the job, bartender.”

Ben grabbed their glasses in his free hand and carried her through the corridor, into the crew quarters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	11. Alone Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After returning to Tatooine from the WBW and getting their bearings, Ben and Rey head for the crew quarters of the Falcon. Something is different this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re a subscriber reading this, thanks for waiting a month in between chapters. And thank you for reading! This is a new thing for me and the learning curve is steep and thrilling. I love it.
> 
> thanks to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for their eyes on this!  
> 

Rey was a formidable opponent. A powerful Force user. She was fierce and wild and strong and relentless. 

But in Ben’s arms she was warmth. She was tenderness; trust. She was even vulnerable at times, he thought—just like he was. He wanted to protect her. He knew she could look after herself, but he wanted to make her feel cared for, make her feel safe. The things that he had long felt short-changed on, he wanted to give to her.

Coming home to Rey — not through the portal, but finally letting in the light after so long— was like taking his first breath. He couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t riddled with anguish, fear, paranoia. He almost didn’t know how to behave, now that those feelings weren’t at the front of his every waking moment. He noticed himself defaulting to silence a lot, letting his body, _their_ bodies, do the talking. But he surprised himself too, finding his sense of humor intact; something accessible and immediate even while he didn't feel fully at ease in his own skin. 

Still, he felt more natural with Rey than he ever had with anyone, and he felt good— _really_ good, even better than he had imagined. And he had imagined plenty.

He wanted her. All the time. 

Some of it was wicked, he thought. Some of the ways he wanted her . . . wanted her body. All of it. Every inch, _his_. He had dreamt about her, about being with her, for such a long time; he had already envisioned a million different ways to touch her. To explore her and pleasure her. To love her. 

They had only been reunited for a day at most, but the instinct to be intimate superseded nearly everything. Their first time was a blur: immediate, urgent. The second time, they slowed down, but only by a hair. Everything was new, and it didn’t last that long. Later that night they found each other again in the dark, still getting acquainted, giggling quietly, testing, teasing. That next morning, Ben awoke wanting more of her. More. He didn’t care how, where; in the sand? Fine. Just more. 

Something about her had felt familiar since the day he found her on Takodana. Since then, he couldn’t get his mind off of her; she was always _in there_. When he was in the throes of chaos and teetering on madness, Rey was like a haunting melody that replayed in his ears.

It was stunning, after he tried to interrogate her, what effect she had on him. Not because of how she pushed back into his own mind; yes, that threw him off— but it was her mere presence that disturbed his fragile grip on order, on feeling some kind of control over his destiny. Something felt all wrong, the way they were intimately connected to each other when they were on opposite sides of a war. The next time he had a private moment, he let the tears fall behind his mask.

If he was honest, he was never on a _side_ of the war so much as he was _not_ on the side of the family whose betrayal had broken him. His real allegiance was to his fears, his anger and the open wounds that Snoke, or Palpatine, preyed upon. 

It was hell, living like that. 

But Rey had been like a cool breeze on the back of his neck that distracted him from the roiling fury inside. The darkness wouldn’t leave him alone . . . and neither would she.

Now he really was alone, free of Palpatine, but she was still with him. He was alone with _her_.

With the only woman, he thought. The original. The one.

_“You’ve been drinking on the job, bartender.”_

She was funny. Smart. Quick to tease him and he liked it that way. She could kick his ass, too. She had, more than once— and he deserved it. It turned him on, thinking about when they had crossed sabers. How she moved, how she used her body creatively, fearlessly. She had a vitality to her, and an uncanny intuition. And she could surprise a person with compassion when they least expected it, like she had done for him. There was nobody like her.

Over the last day or so, he had to keep reminding himself this was all real. He was here, he survived— and he was with Rey. This woman he had loved since he saw her, even if he hadn’t put a name to it at the time. This woman who tried to shoot him when their Force bond first opened— he wanted her even then; so _impulsive_ , so fiery. This woman he longed for, across parsecs, had him wishing the impossible— that they could be together. He could hardly believe that it _was_ possible now; that he could be . . . 

_Happy_. 

Throughout life, he had become convinced that happiness was an illusion. A fairytale for the weak. But he hadn’t smiled this much in . . . he couldn’t remember how long. Everything had been a blur over the last day or so, but the one constant was his body. His cheeks felt different, from smiling. And his neck wasn’t so stiff anymore. Sure; maybe it was from the meditation, on the other side of the portal. Maybe it was just being with Rey. 

It struck him as genuinely funny, if absurd, that he had given up his life only to get it back. He hadn’t expected that on Exegol; didn’t count on it. He just knew what he had to do.

And he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

_For her._

Rey made a little fake biting noise, nuzzling into his collarbone as he rounded the corridor into the crew quarters. Once there, he would set her down gently, he thought, so she wouldn’t lose her footing from being weak in the knees. 

_He_ did that. It felt _glorious_.

She was flushed and relaxed. But still excited. Electric. 

_This woman._

“Rey, sweetheart . . .”

He had to tell her how much he wanted her, perhaps even the wicked ways . . . _she might have thoughts like that, too_. 

But more than that, he wanted to tell her how she made him feel so _right_. How much he loved her. Their connection was so profound that he knew she could sense it, that she felt the same about him . . . ( _How did he manage to get so lucky?_ ) But he still wanted to say it out loud. A thousand times. It felt so good, so healthy, when he first told her. After all this time with those feelings building inside him, growing from a tiny corner of his heart that he had left open— maybe on purpose— the words were medicine.

He _loved her_. 

“In a hurry?” she cooed into his neck. 

He set down the glasses on a stack of cargo containers that had been piled into the crew quarters, and wrapped his newly free arm around her. But he didn’t release her just yet. She felt good in his arms. He could hold her all day and night and never tire.

“Rey, listen to me.” Her fingers danced up his neck, brushing through his hair, and she was smiling as she sprinkled kisses on his face. He could feel his ears go hot.

“So serious. Have you got an announcement?” She wiggled as she was pressed against his stomach. He knew it was a challenge, daring him to keep holding her steady. 

His mind raced with every endearment he’d ever heard, but none of them sounded good enough for her. He had just ravished her on the games table in his father’s old ship, and he was taking her to bed; he didn’t have an announcement. He had a woman to love, and wanted to tell her what she meant to him.

He finally lowered her down slowly, but she rendered him mute anyway, when she tilted her mouth up to his. Reaching up to him with those lithe arms, she sent pure energy through their bond, touching him in places where her hands couldn’t. 

She ran her fingers along his jaw as they kissed, dragged them down his chest, his abdomen, before pulling up his tunic in a motion that was both forceful and graceful. Something about her deliberateness gave him butterflies in his stomach. He raised his arms in enthusiastic compliance as she lifted the shirt over him and cast it onto the floor. 

His hips jerked toward hers like they had a mind of their own; he was helpless with her. Could barely keep a lid on his appetite. 

Rey guided his hands to her naked bottom and placed his thumbs just so, into the dimples where her ass met her lower back. 

_Fuck, she’s perfect._

He bit back a whimper when she started untying his pants. They had been naked together all during the night before, but it was still so new, being with someone like this. With _her_. The feeling of her fingers so close to his cock made his heart pound and his thoughts go fuzzy.

It seemed like an eternity while she undid all the ties, but he waited, and waited . . . then, she crouched down. His hands ended up in her hair as her face neared his erection. The look in her eyes was positively feral; untamed. She licked the length of him. The sensation reached every nerve ending in his body. 

His throat made a sound he didn’t recognize, blending into her name— a perfect, sacred word.

“ _Rey_ . . . ”

He did not know how to survive another encounter with her tongue, so he backed up an inch, but hurried to finish peeling off his pants. She looked so pleased, so natural as she pulled up her vest. He reached behind her and began fussing stupidly with the bindings he had nudged down earlier. Suddenly, they were impossible to navigate. He couldn’t concentrate.

But she smiled, and reached back, and they were off in an easy instant.

_Perfect_.

Then she took a step backward herself, and found her whiskey glass. Rey stood there naked, her form bewitching; startling. Her brown hair was a wavy, sweet mess; one bun had survived the day but the rest mostly hung at her shoulders. Her neck had a sheen from the heat in the cabin, and it drew his gaze down to her pert nipples, pink and so inviting. He followed the lines of her body, its slopes and proportions all art. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

Without breaking eye contact, she took a slow sip of whiskey.

_This woman will be the beginning and the end of me._

She made him feel like an animal. He couldn’t breathe properly; he was all body. 

Then, she set the glass down and reached for him— and before he could think or speak, her body was pressed against his— her softness and her strength, her smooth skin and her sun-darkened freckles. Their bond was buzzing as she led him into bed, guiding his lips down to her breasts as they crawled into the bunk together. She tasted like minerals and heat and honey. His head was a jumble of half-thoughts, of powerful love and excruciating lust, and he wanted to tell her, to tell her, to _tell her . . ._

——————

No one knew Rey’s story. 

Except for Ben.

He didn’t know the middle, or the real beginning, or the end —one day, he would— but he knew her the way she knew him: in this strange, silent understanding that had unsettled and tempted them both since their first encounter. He knew her, and she wanted him to. 

In the desert, nothing was a straight line. Everything that looked linear at first glance revealed itself, eventually, to be an imperfect and ingenious scrawl; the closer you looked, the more winding the path: the crest of a dune. The ripples around a depression. The rarified wisps of water vapor that yearned to become clouds, feathering the stark Jakku sky two or three times each year.

Her story wasn’t a straight line. And neither was Ben’s.

Rey was an expert when it came to unearthing something unusual, something precious but discarded; always studying that mysterious balance between the broken and the beautiful. Everything she collected over so many years had its faults, its uses, and its variable parts that she’d have to decide how to incorporate into the whole of her life. Whether it was piecing together a humble, ramshackle skeleton of an AT-AT for a home, or finding a single, once-in-a-lifetime desert bloom that she strove to keep as long as the arid climate would allow— Rey saw past the sharp lines of rejection and carved a humble path to salvation. Ever the arbiter, the compromiser, never the one being judged. An invisible architect.

Ben didn’t judge her, but he saw her. 

_Her_. Not an idea of her that someone else conjured, of a Resistance fighter, a Jedi . . . just her. He could peer past the roles that she never requested and truly _see_ who she was: a lonely soul, a person with weaknesses, with desires. He had always seen her.

There were so many times she had been frightened of him, at first. Not of his strength, or his power— those things were intimidating, but they weren’t what rattled her deep down. She was frightened of the way he saw her, knew her; the way no one ever had. No one looked closely enough. They saw a scrappy scavenger; a competent young pilot or engineer; maybe some sort of hero-in-the-making. A nice girl, a kind friend. And she imagined that he saw those things too . . . 

But what Ben really saw was a woman. A person, first and foremost, who harbored rage as well as compassion; who doubted herself, and who desperately wanted to belong.

And seeing herself that way— _that_ was what scared her. His gaze pierced the armor she built to keep people from getting to know her; no one else had scratched too far beneath the surface. She certainly didn’t want to look. But she had begun to face it finally; face her darkness and her power. And her desires. She was still facing it, she thought, every day now. Trying to look in the mirror without turning away.

Seeing herself for who she really was. The way Ben did.

Rey had always been drawn to his eyes. _A pair of pretty eyes._ There was a strange honesty in them. With or without the mask, she could feel the way his spirit brushed up against hers, without pretending to be something it wasn’t. When she realized she could scrape as far into his mind as he could into hers, she felt his eyes open wide —fixed on her in a mixture of awe and something else that she would come to know as desire. 

Now, after all this time staring at each other, they could share their bodies. She had craved it for so long and knew he had, too.

Rey had always used her instincts and her body to find what she needed for survival. Now she was using them in the exaltation of living; of love. Here she was, pressed up against Ben’s chest as he carried her. His breath was sweet with whiskey and with the nectar he drank from her. His cheeks were flushed, those warm brown eyes, _pretty eyes_ , full of want. His body was hard in the anticipation of what they would do together; in the anticipation of _her_.

It was a feeling like nothing else, being wanted like that. By _him_. Their bond through the Force made being together feel natural, but it wasn’t only their bond; it was just . . . them. They wanted each other from the beginning. Rey fought those feelings and she was glad she lost the battle. They were meant to be together.

And the things she wanted from his body seemed to be endless. A secret part of her was alive now. In her dreams, sometimes she had been with him; waking up flushed; hot and needful, unsatisfied and peeved. Now he was here, and she wanted to _consume_ him. Everything he did to her, every time she tried a new way of touching him— the way she experienced pleasure seemed to expand. She wondered if there were limits to how much you could love someone; how much you could desire another person. Perhaps not.

——————

His mouth dragged along her body as she reclined on the bed.

The Falcon had been baking in the desert heat. There was almost no ventilation, and Rey hadn’t thought to boot up the cooling system. 

They were both pink from the whiskey and the warmth.

“Rey, I want to tell you . . . ” 

She brought his hand to her lips as he spoke, spreading wet kisses across his thick knuckles. More than one had been broken before; she could tell by the feel. Her perfect, imperfect treasure. _Ben_.

“Tell me what?” 

He tried to answer, but instead, his breath seemed to catch on something when she sucked his fingertip. 

“What is it?”

“Te— Tell you how . . . ” 

She reached forward and slid a hand along the length of him, smiling coyly, just gently drawing his hardness forward. There was so _much_ of him. 

He shut his eyes.

“Ahh— Uhhh . . . ” None of the noises he made were words.

“How what?” 

He was holding his breath now. She decided to stop teasing and let him make his speech.

“How beautiful you are,” he said, leaning in, speaking quietly between kisses. “How I’ve wanted you for so long . . . ”

“Ben . . . ” His words, the desire written on his face only made her want him more. Her hands were on his back asking for the whole of his body. “Ben, _please_ ,” she said, aching to feel him.

He settled against her entrance, taking shorter, sparser breaths. 

“Mmm . . . ” He pressed in a little. She let out a clipped cry. 

“Rey—I want to tell you,” he pleaded again. But his body was way ahead of him. He pushed further in. She was gasping from the stretch, from how good it felt, how much she wanted all of him inside of her. 

“Tell me . . . Tell me,” she breathed, hips canting up.

His arms tensed against the bed. 

“Rey— ahhhhH—” His groan grew louder, then cut off as he sank all the way in, filling her. 

Her breath caught when he bottomed out. She felt his exhale hot on her cheeks while she clung to the solid muscles of his back. He pulled back and slid forward again, sending her into a wordless shiver.

“You—You’re perfect, you feel so— Rey, _baby_ . . . ” His tone was needy, almost desperate as he started moving his hips slowly, joined by her in undulating unison.

Waves of pleasure began to course through her as she sighed, “My _love_ . . . ” and laced her fingers through his hair, tilting her head back as his mouth wandered around her collarbone. Her thigh muscles worked up to meet his rhythm—unhurried, but confident.

He cradled her face and neck with both hands, kissing her dizzy as he moved inside her, quiet _hmm_ s and _ahhh_ s slipping out between the sweet, salty brush of his lips. His thumb rested on her throat, its slight movements both possessive and tender at once. She dug her fingertips into his shoulders and he seemed to answer the pressure in her grip by pushing into her harder, eliciting a heady moan from her as it lit up her core.

They were falling into a steady rocking when Rey began to feel like her body had lifted ever so slightly off the bed. Ben raised his head, alert. When his eyes returned to hers, they were wide with surprise. She felt him slide his hand behind her back and realized they _were_ floating, just above the blanket. He asked a silent question through their bond in the Force.

_Are we . . . ?_

She nodded. 

For a moment, it felt as though the world had stilled. Every stroke and movement seemed to slow down as if they were underwater. 

He let out a puff of air as his lip curled up on one side. She chuffed and smiled back at him, but it didn’t take long for him to lean close again and seize her lips with his.

The weightlessness gave them a new freedom, so their angle shifted slightly. They both moaned loudly when they began to move again.

Ben entered a state of passion Rey hadn’t witnessed before; she could sense —and feel— that he was alight with love, incandescent with wonder. His movements were rapturous as he brought her to the edge, pulling her wrists above her head, their fingers intertwined, whispering _baby_ and _love you_ into her skin. She felt a swell of heat rippling outward from the deepest part of her body and her cries lengthened as she began to let go.

Seeming to sense her at the precipice of something, his thrusts became more insistent and his breathing grew erratic.

Their gaze never broke. 

She was quivering in an out-of-body limbo just before coming. He let out a series of rich groans that crescendoed while Rey’s voice trilled higher and higher, as they both reached the brink of orgasm.

The climax shot through them and they came undone in each other’s arms.

They were suspended in midair, crying out each other’s names without words. Rey quaked with electricity inside, jolting and spasming, seeing stars as Ben spilled into her, his body thrumming with energy in its release, eyes wild with euphoria.

—Then the light in the room suddenly flashed a blinding white. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)
> 
> The chapter title is a 1930s song by Dietz & Schwartz. Here is an old-timey vocal rendition from the 40s [Alone Together 1947 Beryl Davis (youtube)](https://youtu.be/iltvqTTrIV0)


	12. Linked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ben come back down to earth, hoping to make sense of what's happening by putting their heads together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for her help with this!  
> .  
> .  
> .

A vacuum . . . a void. And a great wave. Not water, but energy. 

Three lights in the blackness. Blinking, swirling around each other, combining to form one.

Searing heat—the kind from inside a star, unknowable but often imagined, radiating outward from a center . . . 

_Those who seek balance must find the center._

An older woman. Petite, hooded, holding a thin staff with a loop at the top: A shepherdess. A Togruta.

Her voice cuts through from a cold, distant plane. 

_As powerful as life itself._

The sensation of flying. Not in the air, but in space. Not in a ship, but in body. 

A child. Two children on different planets. Twins . . . No, strangers. With a thread between them.

A man and a woman, crossing sabers, holding hands. 

Enemies. Lovers. 

_A dyad._

Linking them both, the Force. Connecting every living thing.

Every soul, everywhere—all at once. 

A great wave. Not water, but energy. And a vacuum . . . a void. 

——— 

Holding each other in the air and breathless in the hot cabin, they gently descended back down to the bed. Rey and Ben were practically drenched in sweat, panting, nearly limp from exertion and intense, mind-emptying pleasure.

And they had just shared a vision as powerful as any they had seen since the Force first connected them.

After a moment, they both pulled away, trying to catch their breath in the heat. 

Ben leaned backwards onto his hands and let out an overwhelmed puff of laughter. Still, he waited a while before speaking.

“What just happened . . . ” He seemed almost dazed.

Rey recognized this feeling from before, when the portal first opened during meditation; when Ben first came back. But this vision was entirely new. And . . . no portal.

“Are your ears ringing?” 

“What?”

Rey could not, in any galaxy, believe he would choose this moment to be clever. She watched him try to deadpan, but he was unsuccessful. His lips crept up, even through a visibly extreme, contortionist-worthy effort to stop them. Observing his struggle made her laugh, despite herself.

“Are you _mad?!”_ she asked, almost sincere.

“Who are you again?”

She sprang forward, toppling him onto his back. He didn’t seem at all surprised. He was chuckling, pleased with himself, pliant and ready for whatever retaliation she had in store for him. 

She had plenty of ideas.

———

“Huh.” Ben folded his arms, slumping back against the bench in front of the Dejarik table where several old, ornate books were laid open.

Rey was pointing to a hand-drawn diagram labeled almost like a ship schematic, but prettier. She and Ben sat together with a shared plate wiped clean of some odds and ends Rey had scrounged from ration packs, still chewing their last bites. They had been studying the texts over the last hour in between mouthfuls of reconstituted carbohydrates. 

BB-8 rolled up to the table as if to show interest in a group discovery.

“I told you,” she said, mouth full of dried Nabooean pear paté. 

He sighed, cocking an eyebrow.

“Looks like it really _was_ something Luke just saw in a book.” His lips started to curl, but Rey was onto him this time. 

“You’ve been quite smart ever since . . . ” She began her declaration strong but trailed off, blushing and smiling.

“Ever since what?” He said it with a sharp finish, narrowing his eyes like he had just tricked her.

“You . . . You’ve just been rather smart,” she repeated. 

“Well,” he said, crossing his arms behind his head, “I suppose you _could_ call me an intellectual . . . ” 

Rey shot BB-8 a knowing glance.

Ben furrowed his brow.

“I saw that.”

“ _Ben_.”

The warmth between them was palpable, precious; but they both felt the gravity of what had just happened. 

Their shared vision after the room went white had seemed similar to Ben’s experience meditating in the World Between Worlds. They saw the same things—overwhelming images of the universe, mysterious and profound; some familiar, others less so.

It led them to pore over the Jedi texts in search of understanding. Ben knew much of the information from his time training with Luke, but he had rarely looked through the books themselves. His uncle had been quite protective over the manuscripts, only allowing him to peruse them under supervision.

Rey had acquired translations for some of the books that were written in ancient languages, but other parts were readable as-is, like the ones she had flipped through while passing time in Luke’s X-Wing. A few were in an older form of Basic, and Ben’s somewhat bizarre knowledge of archaic Aurebesh script proved to be a boon to their understanding. 

“Alright. A vergence brought me back—”

“ _I_ brought you back, more like.”

“ _You_ brought me back . . . through a vergence in the Force.”

“And you pulled me through another vergence to the World Between Worlds.”

“It had to be the same one. Tatooine isn’t suddenly full of vergences just lying around.” Rey nodded, granting him that likelihood. “There’s nothing special here. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m from the middle of nowhere.”

“You’re the only good thing about the desert. Any desert.” 

In more than one account, vergences were described as places where the Force was preternaturally strong; like the now-destroyed holy city on Jedha, or the Jedi temple at Lothal. But there were also mentions in other texts about objects, or even people, that acted as vergences.

The clearest description was from a scholarly Jedi who outlined a theorem of chain worlds. Thought to be a series of vergences that linked the living world with the cosmic Force, the portals were doorways to that ethereal blackness of the void— the World Between Worlds. 

“This, I recognize,” Ben slid one of the volumes over to Rey. “The chain worlds theorem. It’s . . . something the Emperor had been fixated on. In the past.” He studied her face carefully for her reaction, and Rey knew it was because of who the Emperor was. Who he was to her. They hadn’t even spoken properly about it, and she wasn’t eager to do so, anyway. 

“That’s the same as the World Between Worlds, then.” She was intent on moving on, glossing over his reference to the man who was supposedly her grandfather.

Ben nodded, inscrutable. “I think so.”

He took a deep breath. 

“Rey, I don’t think you opened a vergence. I think you created one.”

“You mean, when I healed your kyber crystal, meditating . . .”

“Maybe that. You might have transformed the crystal into some kind of vergence, or . . . or the vergence could even be in the sand out there, past those garbage moisture harvesters.”

She shot him an eye roll.

“I spent a lot of time cleaning those up. Maybe the vergence _is_ a garbage moisture harvester.”

“Who knows. But I think you created one, right here, just outside this . . . backwater farm.”

Something about his disdain for this place could feel so tiresome to Rey.

 _. . . Or, it could be the homestead_ , she thought.

“Or that,” Ben acknowledged. 

“But when you disappeared . . . ” She nearly winced, thinking back to the pain she felt when he vanished from the world a second time.

“I don’t have an explanation for that. But I think vergences can be unreliable. Arbitrary. There was no portal just now, for instance, when we . . .” His voice was a bit more hushed as his eyes darted over to the corridor leading to the crew quarters. 

“Made love?” Rey answered quietly, smiling.

BB-8 silently rolled away.

“So elegant. The way you put it.” His eyelids hung low as he leaned in, presumably for a kiss.

“What do _you_ call it?”

“Let’s see, there are a few different names for it . . .” He traced a finger up her arm, then cupped her face with his hand, looking at her lips. “ _Yatuka foo ma nal chaska_ , for instance . . .”

Rey blushed. “I know _yatuka_ means ‘to move’ in Huttese . . .”

“To move with my glorious star.” 

“ _Showoff_ ,” she cooed, glowing. 

He brushed his thumb across her lower lip, and Rey shivered softly at the intense look in his eyes. It seemed as though they might easily wind up in the same place as they were just one hour ago. 

“But, Ben—” She placed a hand on his and pulled back a bit.

“I speak other languages, too,” he said quickly, quietly.

“Of course you do. But before we _yatuka_ . . .” 

“Your verb conjugation is wrong.”

“ _Ben_.”

“Yes, _nal chaska_?”

“There _wasn’t_ a portal, like you said. Nothing happened, when we . . .”

“A lot happened, I thought.”

She laughed, exasperated. 

“But be serious, for just one moment. Please . . . You had a point. Why wasn’t there a doorway?”

“Maybe it doesn’t always happen. Maybe we didn’t open the vergence together.”

“Perhaps. _Unless_ . . .” She looked around the main hold. He seemed to understand right away.

“An entire ship? _This_ old rustbucket?” He raised an eyebrow and shook his head slowly. “I don’t think—”

“I’ll have you know, I love flying this old rustbucket.” 

“This ship is not a vergence in the Force. It’s a . . . dilapidated, fifty year-old freighter-tug jerry rigged for smuggling spice.”

“Stranger things have happened in just the last standard rotation.”

“How do you propose we test your hypothesis?”

“I haven’t got that far yet; you’re the intellectual, right? You’ll think of something.”

“That was . . . I was just kidd—” 

She pecked him on the mouth and opened another book.

Something very powerful was happening, and they knew they needed to learn more. Rey wanted to fly back to Ajan Kloss, to talk with Maz Kanata. And it was time, she thought, to return to the Resistance. Ben was wary of seeing Maz, of the whole thing really, but Rey was insistent. 

Yet, there was the small matter of _explaining_ Ben, and Exegol, and Tatooine, and . . . well, everything. Over a day and a half, Rey felt like she had lived an entire lifetime with Ben. After the despair and disorientation she felt leaving Exegol, being reunited with her other half was a balm for her soul. 

Her happiness, the sense of _rightness_ seemed almost foreign; like she was living in a different reality than the one she had so recently left on the jungle moon, with her friends. She wasn’t sure how to return to normal life with Ben Solo, whatever that even meant. Kylo Ren was the face of the First Order; the ultimate symbol of everything the Resistance had fought and died to defeat. This was anything but normal.

Ben wasn’t a different person. He had always been Ben Solo, even when he wore the mask of Kylo Ren. But he was a healed person, she thought. Or . . . healing. She hoped her friends could accept him, if only out of their love for her. 

She’d have to talk to Rose first.

——— 

That evening as the suns began to set, Ben was downstairs at the homestead while Rey tinkered with some motivators in the Falcon’s engine room with BB-8. The cooling system had been shorting out, and Rey couldn’t let it go, even though Ben tried to tell her it had been unfixable ever since he could remember and had a mind of its own. 

She was waist-deep surrounded by wires, wearing a headlamp that kept slipping off from the sweat on her brow. It was an added annoyance that she had just been in the fresher, taking a much-needed shower. She’d half expected, perhaps _wished_ , that Ben would show up and surprise her while she was bathing, but she suspected he was exhausted and had fallen asleep instead. Her hope was to join him, as her fatigue was finally catching up with her, too. There was just one more cable to solder . . . 

Before she could finish, she heard a notification echo from the cockpit: _Missed HoloCall_. Rey had missed so many messages over the last few days, she felt guiltier each time she thought of her friends. Finn could be a worry-wart, Poe was probably still stewing about Rey nicking his droid, and Rose was often exasperated with them both, just wanting everyone to get along. But all of them cared for Rey. It felt good to have people in your life who worried about you.

She set down her pliers and torch, peeled off the headlamp, and hoisted herself out of the engine room’s floor hatch. Her newly cleaned leggings and tank top were grimy again. _Kriff this kriffing cooling system._

“BB, mind closing up that last connection for me so it’s ready when I get back?”

_Dwip-tirr._

She reached back down into the hatch to pull the bundle of wires up and plopped them in front of the droid, who extended a hook-shaped appendage and began fishing for the offending cables.

Rey twisted one antenna lovingly before wiping her brow with a rag and heading down the corridor to the cockpit.

There, she was surprised to find Ben sitting in the pilot’s chair, looking off into the creamy purple sunset. He craned his head around upon hearing her footsteps and moved as if to get out of a reserved seat. 

“No, stay,” she said, “you look good in that chair.” Rey felt a tenderness wash over her and couldn’t help but smile.

Ben wasn’t smiling. His face was blank in a way, yet it was also a thousand things at once—he looked like he had been swimming in his own thoughts, lost in memories. 

“I, uh . . . was just . . . ” He turned back to face the window, and Rey stepped further in, resting a hand on his shoulder. He placed his own hand upon hers.

“You’re thinking of . . . ” She couldn’t finish; he seemed fragile.

“No. I’m . . . Yes. Thinking.” 

Rey had the sudden urge to take care of him, to hold him and comfort him. He must have sensed it, because he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it, eyes closed but still facing the controls.

She knew who he was; what he had done and what he had overcome. She had helped him. But healing would still take time, and he’d have to be alone with his thoughts—and his past—just like anyone else.

“I’ll just get back to my repairs—”

“No,” he said softly as he turned in the chair to face her, “don’t go yet.” 

He kissed her hand again, then the inside of her wrist, looking up at her with those warm brown eyes, lips traveling the underside of her forearm toward her elbow. He started to get up, but she splayed her other hand out on his chest, gently guiding him back into the seat. A tiny grin began to peek through his expression, and Rey let out a low, quiet huff of laughter as she climbed into the seat with one leg, intending to straddle him.

He brought his hands to her hips, squeezing softly, his crooked smile growing as he looked her up and down. 

“The cooling system is cursed, Rey. You’ll never fix it permanently.” His voice was hushed.

She grasped his shoulders and brought her other leg up into the seat, accidentally kicking a switch in the process, and her lips stopped just short of his. His hands slid up to her waist, pulling her against him.

“I’ll fix it. You’ll see.” She held his face in her palms.

Their mouths met in a slow, amorous kiss. 

“REY?!?” The static-y, shrill, harried sound of a man’s voice sliced through the moment. 

Rey and Ben’s eyes widened as they turned towards the sound coming from the comms panel.

Two small blue holograms of Poe and Finn were staring at them slack-jawed through the HoloNet, and a third, female face popped into the viewer.

“Oh no,” Rose said ominously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	13. Here Goes Nothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An unexpected HoloNet link to the Resistance leads Rey into a potentially fraught social, or even political, situation. Our couple's time on Tatooine is nearing its end. Ben gets a visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unless I suddenly turn into Honore de Balzac, drinking 40 cups of coffee every day, catapulting me into some sort of super-productivity--next update will probably be in a month. Will always shoot for sooner if I can, though! Thank you for reading this far - it’s awfully nice to know there are people enjoying this. =)
> 
> thanks to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for their eyes on this!  
> .  
> .  
> .

Ben reached over swiftly and mashed the kill-switch.

Rey glared at him, aghast.

“Why did you do that?”

“I panicked!”

She scrambled up and out of the seat, turning knobs and pressing buttons to re-establish the HoloCall, blushing but determined.

“Wait, Rey, just wait—” He stood up, placing his hands gently on her shoulders, but she threw him a look that said _absolutely not_ , and he backed away, hands up in the air.

The HoloCall reconnected.

There were men’s voices shouting in the background, and Rose’s face was front and center, presenting a sheepish, weary smile.

“Hi, Rey. And, uh . . .” Her gaze shifted away, over to the figure just behind Rey’s shoulder.

Ben was like a statue.

Rey burst out with one great blast of laughter. She imagined all this happening very differently, rather than by surprise while she and Ben had been otherwise engaged. 

Rose’s eyes flitted around, as if she were waiting for some sort of instruction, and then she forced out a couple of nervous giggles that seemed purely for Rey’s benefit.

Rey covered her face with her hands, trying to calm down.

The argument in the background went silent, and Poe came into the viewer again. Finn was nowhere in sight.

“Rey,” he said loudly, his tenor electric and forceful. “Poe Dameron here. Remember me? I’m a general? Yeah, hi, hello? Uhh, who is that . . . _with_ you?” He spat the last two words like he was discovering poison in his mouth. But Rey was used to Poe. This was his everyday temperament.

She massaged her temples, stifling more inappropriate laughter in order to reply.

“Right. Yes. He’s, this is . . . ”

“Sorry, who?” Poe wasn’t laughing at all. Or smiling. His eyes were very wide, but his jaw was set tight.

“Poe . . . ” Rose looked at him like they had a secret language that he had spontaneously forgotten. 

“I wanna hear you say it.” His voice got even louder. “I wanna hear Rey, _our Rey_ , tell me who that is. Who’s that in the cockpit with you, Rey? Who is that?”

This time, the transmission was terminated by someone on the other end.

———

“They despise me.” Ben had a sober look, speaking matter-of-factly as he raked a hand through his hair. “Of course they do. They should. They won’t . . .” He sighed. “I knew I couldn’t go back.”

“You’ve already come back.” Rey reached for his hand. “Ben,” she said quietly, “you already have.”

“This could go very badly.” He tightened their interlocked fingers.

“If it hadn’t been for you on Exegol, _everything_ would have gone very badly. They ought to know what you did.” 

“You didn’t tell them . . . anything? About Exegol, about—they don’t know about the bond, the dyad . . .” He was reading her face. She wondered if he was searching for a look of guilt. “But why should you have told them? I understand. I do.”

Rey felt a bit of his hurt spill over into that very bond, despite the quick change to humility that followed. She rested both hands on his chest and looked up into his eyes.

“They will know everything. I promise.” She remembered back to her conversation with Rose on Ajan Kloss. “And Finn knows . . . something. I'm not sure how much, but he’s—” 

“Finn?”

“My best mate. He used to be a stormtrooper.”

“Ah. From the forest, on Ilum. FN-2187. The Force-sensitive one.”

“That’s not his—even you knew? Everyone knew but me?”

“You didn’t? I sensed it on an . . . excursion. To Tuanul.” 

A few moments passed in silence while they both felt a shadow move across their bond.

“I heard about it.” She knew what happened with the villagers. And she could sense his unease and guilt flow into an earnest desire to change the subject. _Let the past die._

“He’s really your best friend?”

“What’s so surprising about that?”

“Well, you didn’t feel his Force-sensitivity. And I never thought stormtroopers made for very good company.” Rey could’ve sworn she heard an echo of Han Solo’s sardonic cadence in Ben’s remark.

“This one does. And there are others, deserters from the First Order.”

“They hate me, Rey.” His voice went quiet. “They’ll want to kill me.” 

“But I love you. They’ll listen. It might be . . . awkward, but—”

“Awkward? It won’t be awkward, it’ll be war crimes. It’ll be . . . ” His dour expression turned even darker.

He was right. Ben would be facing intense hostility from the Resistance; perhaps they would even want to enact some sort of frontier justice on him. Still, none of them even knew about his sacrifice; they didn’t know what he had done for her—for everyone, really—on Exegol. 

“Not if I have anything to say about it. You’re the reason I’m alive, you stood with me against . . .” She was still loath to speak the Emperor’s name. “They can’t ignore that.”

He brought a curled finger up to trace her cheek, then tugged lightly at one of her hair buns. 

“You assume the best of people,” he said. “I love that about you. I want to be more like you.” She turned her head and pressed it to his chest, asking for an embrace. He brought his arms around her and hugged her to him, rubbing her shoulders and kissing her hair. “Should we . . .” 

“Right now?” Rey was surprised, but she wasn’t entirely opposed to going back to bed with him; if only to postpone facing the mess that seemed to await with her friends.

“ . . . Call them back?” He smiled, perhaps sensing a hint of what had entered her mind.

“Oh. Right. Of course.” She surprised herself, feeling almost embarrassed for thinking about sex again. They had ignored so many messages, plenty of meals; the time since Ben returned had been filled with near-constant desire, which they had indulged heartily. Rey made a mental note to thank Kaydel for suggesting an implant all those months back.

_Incoming HoloCall._

“Looks like they beat us to it,” Ben said, eyeing the comms panel.

Rey went to accept the message, but before turning the knob, she reached back for Ben’s hand and held it firmly. He shot her a look as if to say _here goes nothing_ , sending a feeling of trust through the bond, and shuffled forward a few feet to stand side-by-side with her.

———

Rose’s blue face appeared in miniature.

“Hi, Rey. Sorry for the . . . confusion.” Her eyes dropped to their clasped hands, but if she was surprised, or if she disapproved, her face didn’t betray her.

“Oh, er, likewise. Bad connection, I guess.” Rey took a deep breath. “I’ve missed you. All of you.” The others weren’t in range of the viewer but she suspected they were nearby.

Rose echoed the sentiment—something about missing Rey for what was the apparently scandalous span of a whole week. But Rey couldn’t hear Rose over her own thoughts, over the urgent, ungainly introduction that was clawing its way out of her mouth.

“Oh, and . . . this is Ben. Ben Solo.” 

“Ben. Solo.” Rose repeated his name almost like a question. “Hello,” she said with a generous, if cautious, tone.

He simply nodded, expressionless.

“Well, Poe wants to say something to you. Right, Poe?” Poe Dameron walked into the viewframe, surly-faced but keeping it together, Rey supposed.

“Rey, yeah okay sorry about the . . . yelling.” His thick eyebrows were gnarled together; he didn’t seem at all contrite. This had the hallmarks of Rose’s orchestration. Poe’s eyes fell to Rey and Ben’s hands as well, and his upper lip pinched just enough for Rey to notice.

“It’s fine, it’s all right,” Rey said, diplomatically as she was able. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Maybe easier in person . . . Where’s Finn?”

Rose looked apologetic. 

“He had to . . . take care of something.” 

“Oh.” Rey shouldn’t have felt hurt; it was all very complicated and fraught. But she did.

“So,” Poe said, his voice hardly any less caustic than before, “this is Ben Solo, huh? As in, Leia’s son? Looks a whole helluva lot like Kylo Ren to me.”

Ben just glared at him. He didn’t blink. Rey wanted this to be over already, and squeezed Ben’s hand tighter. But then Finn’s voice cut in as his figure moved into the viewer. Apparently, he didn’t have anything to _take care of_ after all.

“Yeah, that’s Kylo Ren.” He sounded calm, unruffled—unlike his colleague. His hands were on his hips and he looked at Rey with a familiar kindness; the trustworthy face of the first real friend she ever made. “Good to see you, Rey. Really good.” 

“Finn,” she smiled. “Yes, it is. Good.”

“The messages you left were kinda vague. Worried me a little.” _A little._ For someone who wanted to send a scout after her, Finn was rather playing down his protectiveness. 

“I can look after myself.” She softened her tone. “But thank you. For checking in on me, to see that I was . . . safe.”

“Yeah, safe. Glad you’re safe. And you seem . . . healthy.” At that, she blushed. Finn gave her a hint of a smile before setting his scrutiny on Ben. Finn’s face wasn’t usually hard to read, but it was still as a stone now, and it filled Rey with an odd sense of dread. “Funny crossing paths with _you_ again, Supreme Leader.” 

That seemed designed to taunt Ben in just the wrong way. He spoke, finally.

“There is no Supreme Leader. The First Order is over, dead. Along with the Emperor, along with the Sith Eternal—all because of Rey.” 

He turned to her and, without looking back at the Holos, brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed it. 

She sent a surge of warmth through their bond, and knew he received it.

Her friends were silent at the other end of the HoloNet, just watching them.

Rey felt fearless; larger than her body—unconstrained by whatever resentment was simmering, whatever judgement was percolating inside the minds of her friends, dear as they were to her. She had always had a certain grit, a survivor’s strength, but she was even braver with Ben by her side.

“We’re coming to Ajan Kloss. See you all soon.” She switched off the HoloNet and threw her arms around Ben.

——— 

They made a small supper after the HoloCall. Ben knew his way around a galley surprisingly well, Rey thought, for someone who’d probably been served by droids most of his life. He managed to make a sauce using some whiskey and a bit of jogan paste. The rehydrated protein loaf was much improved by it. Rey wondered privately if it was something he learned from Han.

“I don’t like the way he talked to you.” They sat on the ramp of the Falcon, watching the suns set over an unusually still evening as they finished up their meal. “The pilot, Dameron.”

Rey hadn’t spent any mental energy on how individual members of the Resistance would deal with Ben; there hadn’t been time to slow down. She considered Poe and how difficult he could be as she sopped up the last of the sauce with some polystarch bread.

“He’s very . . . passionate.”

“Passionate?” He shot her a sideways look, sipping his whiskey.

“No, not—that came out wrong. He's hot-headed. A bit . . .” She didn’t know quite how to explain him to Ben and didn’t want to divulge that she’d always sensed how Poe looked at her with a bit more than admiration. There were times when they’d argue about something— _so many times_ —and she felt a frisson of something _too much_ from him. Not exactly romantic. It was more . . . basic.

“He talked to you like you were _his_. Like you owed him something. You don’t owe that guy anything.”

“I hope you’re not developing a bad opinion of him before even getting to know him.” The last thing she needed was these two men butting heads when her sincerest wish was for her friends to know Ben’s sacrifice . . . And to know that she loved him. To be happy for her.

He shot her a skeptical glance.

“Rey, I interrogated him. I’ve seen inside his mind. He’s a sarcastic, rash, egotistical—”

“Stop.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

“But if he so much as looks at you wrong . . .” He spoke into his glass before taking a large swig and looking out at the dimming horizon. His voice was calm, but it was clear what he meant.

“He won’t.” She wasn’t confident saying it. 

They were silent for a beat longer than was comfortable.

“They have every right to hate me.” 

“Not after they learn what you did, after they learn how you overcame . . . they can’t.” 

“They will. They do.”

“Give it time.” She set her plate down on the ramp and took a sip of her own drink.

“Rose seems nice enough.”

“She is, she’s wonderful. And Finn—”

“He still wants me dead. But he seems to care for you. So maybe I’ll survive.” A half-smile crept across his face, and Rey caught him eyeing her bare feet. “Ever had a foot massage?”

“A what?”

“First time for everything.” He scooted down the ramp and took her right foot in his hands, rubbing circles into the sole with his thumbs. It felt like _heaven_. But she was mortified by the state of her feet.

“I’m filthy! There’s sand and dust and grime everywhere, Ben, please,” she giggled.

“Then it must be time for a shower.”

“Yes, but . . . Hang on, _you’re_ telling _me_ to bathe? Rich.”

“No. I’m telling us.”

He suddenly poked his head under her arm, hoisted her over his shoulder and stood. She bellowed with laughter as he began marching up the ramp with her slung over his back.

“Those plates won’t clean themselves,” she teased as he headed toward the fresher.

“Yeah, we need another droid.”

——— 

He was flying—no, swimming. He was drowning. It was dark; he couldn’t see the surface. There was no surface. Just the cold.

A woman’s voice plunged into the water with him. 

“You have your grandmother’s eyes.”

_Who’s there?_

“Your grandfather’s impatience.”

_Who are you?_

“Your mother’s wit.”

_What the—_

“Your father’s heart.”

He was sweating. He was in the desert, some desert, he didn’t know where. There were three suns. His skin was burning, turning red. His feet were bare on the sand, hot as blaster fire. 

“You have caused suffering.”

_You . . ._

“You have suffered.”

_Where is Rey . . ._

“You will suffer again.”

_Stop. Stop. Leave me alone. Where is REY?_

“But you can overcome it.”

Everything went black and cool and silent. 

“As powerful as life itself . . . Ben.”

A Togruta woman appeared. The shepherdess.

“When you leave your father’s ship, I’ll be waiting.”

———

He bolted upright in the cot, panting, hair sticking to his forehead, beads of sweat rolling down his torso. Rey was lying next to him in the sunken courtyard of the homestead, under the stars that pinned the black canopy of night over the desert. 

“Wh—Are you alright . . . ” She sounded drowsy as she placed a cool hand on his shoulder blade.

Hearing her voice would be soothing if it weren’t for the wild panic in his chest. He bottled up his terror, using every bit of his training to keep from jumping up out of bed and screaming into the night sky, calling the nearest lightsaber and shredding the pourstone walls of this godforsaken place. 

That dream wasn’t a dream at all. It was real, and it was a threat. He was sure he knew what it meant, and he wouldn’t accept it. Not again. Not after finally finding the only place his heart could know peace—in Rey’s arms.

He lied back down next to her and gathered her up to his chest, still huffing—no . . . weeping.

“Ben, my love, what’s—” She brushed his hair with her hands, squeezed his shoulders, kissed away his tears. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”

“No. I’m not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	14. Shadows and Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben's dreams haunt him. Rey worries about the situation. They try to make the most of their time alone before leaving Tatooine. An unusual conversation raises the stakes...
> 
> Little bit of a longer chapter this time, at least for me! Heads up - there's a quite NSFW scene. Playing it a little fast and loose with the hyperspace travel time because I'm still figuring out how to reconcile the various results that different calculators yield, so please forgive the lack of specificity. Might go back and change it eventually, but it's not a crucial thing to get exact in terms of the plot, anyway. Thank you for reading!! Comments and feedback are welcome and appreciated!
> 
>   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for her eyes on this.

The journey to Ajan Kloss would take over a week. During their final couple days on Tatooine, Ben had been less concerned with Rey’s plan to return to the Resistance base. That was nothing; inconsequential at this point. It was the voice that had him agitated. 

_When you leave your father’s ship, I’ll be waiting._

Every night since the first vision, he had heard the Togruta woman’s voice; seen her spectral shape as he fought darkness and confusion while he slept.

He could tell that Rey knew something was wrong. They could only keep so much from one another, although he considered it a blessing that not every errant notion was an opening for them to plumb each other’s thoughts or probe each other’s psyches. If that were true, Rey would know everything he knew, and he didn’t want that. Not now. He didn’t even want to know it himself.

The Jedi were always like this, he thought. There were at least two layers to everything they said, often more. Nothing was ever straightforward. Whoever that woman was—the Togruta Jedi, the shepherdess he and Rey both saw in their vision from before—she was waiting for him. But she was also warning him.

He couldn’t leave his father’s ship.

He may never make it back.

And he’d promised Rey he would never leave her again.

——— 

“Will you hand me that bolt-tightener? Yeah, that one.” Rey had just a few more things she wanted to get done on board the Falcon before flying back to Ajan Kloss. She was determined to fix the cooling system, for one, and she also wanted to give the hyperdrive a tune-up, as a sort of apology to the Resistance that she had borrowed it for so long. Ben was an impossible skeptic about the cooling system, but having his help on the hyperdrive’s cockpit terminal was a rather pleasant way to spend a couple of quiet hours tinkering, and he seemed to enjoy it well enough. Still, she sensed that his mind was elsewhere much of the time since the night he woke up in a panic. And each night after that.

They were just nightmares. Yet something was off about him; something was askew with his presence in the Force. She supposed he had plenty to regret, and he’d be haunted by many things in his life beyond the acts he had committed while in the Emperor’s thrall—his father’s murder being his deepest wound. And he had not reconciled with his mother before she died; didn’t even get to say goodbye. That would give anyone nightmares, Rey imagined.

She had comforted him as best she could, but she still wanted to help him feel more at ease. It worried her that he was so preoccupied. They were about to face the Resistance, who hated him and would take a lot of convincing that he could be trusted. 

During their tense HoloCall, Ben had shown composure. Since the nightmares began, Rey wondered how the shift in mood would affect him when they landed on Ajan Kloss.

He was going to see Chewie for the first time since Starkiller, and he probably hadn’t seen Lando in many years. She hoped that each of these links to Ben’s past might be fortifying, healing, rather than yet another traumatic or even disastrous reunion with someone from his early life. Disaster was a rather dramatic way to think of it, of course. He wouldn’t do anything unkind or foolhardy. Probably. Certainly not.

Despite the delicate situation, Rey was antsy to get underway. She was eager to ask Maz about the vergences, to tell her about the World Between Worlds—to describe what it was like to cross through a portal into another realm of the cosmos. It was Maz, after all, who had an uncanny hunch that it would become meaningful to Rey. She supposed Maz would have as good an idea as anybody about the woman’s voice from the vision she and Ben shared after they began to levitate, although she hoped to find a way to leave out the part about what they were doing when it happened.

Of course, thinking of _that_ only reminded Rey of how much had changed in her life over a matter of only days, with Ben back. 

When she had returned from Exegol, the elation and relief that washed over the Resistance had eluded her, broken and alone as she was. Soon, she would return again, only with Ben Solo in tow. She should be able to celebrate now, surely . . . except, he wouldn’t be welcome. And in an odd way, she felt that she shouldn’t be, by extension; they were together now, bonded. In a way, they always had been. Yet, no one knew about the dyad, or even about their bond in the Force, and that was on Rey. She had made the decision to keep the bond secret for a year because she didn’t know how to explain it without betraying how complicated her feelings were for the man they all hated. How her heart was full of him, even when her waking mind demanded that she ignore it. How she had a thousand words inside her, a million yeses, that she swallowed whenever she encountered this despised man. 

The man who was Leia’s son, once her baby. The man who saved Rey, his own fate be damned. The man she loved.

Right now, however, that man seemed worlds away, having stopped adjusting his share of the spare motivators. He was staring off into space again, or more accurately, the sandy, afternoon-amber view from the pilot’s chair. Rey thought she might know a way to reach him.

“Ben.” 

“Mmm? Sorry.” He snapped out of his reverie. 

“You’ve got three motivators left, we’re almost done in here.”

“You’re quite a taskmaster, do you realize that?”

“Next up is the cooling system, then we’ll be ready to leave.” Rey made her way over from the back of the cockpit.

“If you’re waiting to leave until the cooling system is fixed, we’re never getting off Tatooine. We live here now.”

“I can fix it. Just need a couple more hours, that’s all. But . . .” She nudged a bent knee into his lap, then slid it to one side of his thigh. “You’re in my chair.”

Ben swallowed audibly. She had his attention. He set aside the motivators. 

“ _Your_ chair.”

“ _My_ chair.” 

She straddled him, leaning in for a kiss, but he stopped her.

“Hang on.” He reached forward, with one large hand around her back to keep her steady, and flipped a series of switches. It set the comms panel into offline mode. “Now we can argue about whose chair it is. _Without_ interruptions.”

“I like the way you think, Solo.”

——— 

_Solo_. It felt less strange to hear Rey say it than it did for him to think it. Rey could make anything sound good, though. She certainly made everything _feel_ good. 

“Sure there’s time for this?” he asked, not at all seriously.

“Yes,” she said, scooting closer.

“Even with your big list of repairs?” He couldn’t resist.

“Yes.” Shut him right down. He _loved it_.

Leave it to her to surprise him like this, moving the way she did, sliding and slithering around him like a Mayla vine.

Leave it to her to take his mind out of the abyss of worry and obsession that had been plaguing him since he woke each night in a sweat.

Leave it to her to— _oh_.

He watched her gaze move down to his lips, her eyelids lowered, blinking, as she leaned in slowly. Turning right before he could kiss her, she ghosted her nose down his neck, below his ear. His pulse must have gone up by twenty points in two seconds. She was barely touching him and already had him short of breath as she wandered around with those soft lips just out of reach.

 _Oh._

“Rey,” he warned, “the things I want to do to you . . .” 

She didn’t respond; didn’t even react. Just pulled off her tank top. _Force, she’s beautiful._ Bright, clear eyes, dimpled cheeks, lips he wanted to touch whenever he saw them. The pink tips of her nipples, the slope of her stomach into widened hips that lay open to him. How many times had he daydreamed about her like this? How many times had he worked himself up in his quarters with his hand, desperate and angry and longing for her, just imagining the outline of her body; coming to pieces at the memory of her fingertips on his, her scent in the elevator, her eyelashes? 

He cupped one of her breasts and she canted into his touch, biting her lip. She slipped a hand beneath his shirt, fingertips grazing up the side of his ribcage; a delicate encouragement. He yanked the shirt off in no time at all, moving onto more important things: her pants.

“Dunno know why we bother getting dressed at all, Ben.” 

“Mm hmm.” She had just said something, apparently. He wasn’t sure what it was; his fingers were rolling fabric down her hips. Squeezing the supple flesh there. He wanted to touch every part of her body, to hold and explore and possess every soft curve and sturdy muscle and each perfect freckle that marked her skin. 

The suns were suspended at an angle, casting a golden glare onto the controls and warming up the cockpit. Her smell drove him insane, intensified by the heat: sweet skin mixed with duralloy grease and the faint hint of bitter spice on her breath from the caf she’d been drinking. Traces of soap wafted off of her hair. _So soft._

She moved quickly to help him slip her leggings off. He began untying his own pants just as his erection was beginning to war with the constraints of clothing, as this woman, _his Rey_ , was sitting in his lap. 

She pulled his trousers down to his knees for him, and he didn’t have the patience to deal with them beyond that. He was already so hard, so ready, hands around her waist as she started sliding her body against his thigh; wet and warm and natural.

“Tease,” he breathed out. He thought he was still breathing, anyway.

“If that’s what you’re in the mood for, certainly.” She dropped to the floor, peeled his pant legs off his feet before he realized what was happening, and gripped the inside of his upper thighs with each hand as she lapped around the head of his cock. 

Something went haywire with his vision; was he seeing double? Every muscle in his body tensed as she swirled her tongue around him, stroking upward, experimenting. She looked curious, interested, _delighted_. And she looked up at him with mischief in her eyes, like she wanted to devour him. He could barely contain himself when she took him inside her soft, hot mouth. He knew it was over.

“ _Fuck_ — ” 

“Yes, I’d like that very much.”

“Then—then . . . ” She seemed to understand him despite his incoherence, and climbed back into his lap. He reached between her legs, _so wet_ , and pulled the slippery fluid up to her clitoris, dragging the hot, soft friction around, circling it and eliciting a little cry from her. Then, she grasped him where he ached for her, and lowered herself down to surround him. Fast.

“OH—”

“—AHH”

She pulled back up and sank down again, closing her eyes as a breathy whine escaped her lips. Her thighs on his, her body around his cock—Ben thought he might die of pleasure. She must have sensed it when she let out a little chuckle as short wisps of hair fell about her eyes; he thought he smiled back, but wasn’t entirely sure.

His hands were on her hips, thumbs pressed into her sides as she rocked up and forward, down and back; deliberate and heavy, grasping his shoulders, kissing his nose, his brow. He seized her lips when he had the chance, wanting her to go slower; no, he wanted it fast and hard; maybe he wanted to bend her over and feel her in a different way. He wanted her _every_ way.

“Slow down, Rey. I’m—”

“Wait for me. You can hold on. Please.” 

He couldn’t say no to her. She was gyrating and riding him like some of his wildest fantasies, but he’d give her anything she wanted. He looked down at where their bodies joined and reached between them, threading her clit between the joints of his fingers as she moved. The way her breath caught, the second where she lost her rhythm, the plaintive look on her face—it nearly wrecked him.

“I’m taking you to bed.” _Buy some time, at least._

He managed to stand up, holding her in place, still inside her. This was a challenge, and possibly even dangerous—just the distraction he needed. She had her arms around his neck and kissed him sloppily around the mouth, his jawline, the stubble on his chin, mumbling something— _you_ _need a shave_ —as he began carrying her out into the corridor. She stopped kissing him and shook her head slightly.

“No, no—can’t wait. Here,” she said with a hand in his hair, looking up at him with those big hazel eyes.

“It takes two seconds.” 

“ _Here, now_.” Something about the way she demanded this—it cranked up a dial inside him, all the way into overdrive. Then, she flicked her tongue just below his ear. Liquid electricity shot down his limbs.

He turned just outside the cockpit and shoved her up against one of the padded wall panels. She let out a little shriek, and it was the kind he was hoping for.

“Fine. Here. Now.”

He had her caged in, pinned up against the wall. His brain was barely operable at this point but it occurred to him that maybe there was a reason Lando had this ridiculous ship decorated the way it was.

She was heaving and squirming beneath him, ankles locked around his back and hands holding his face while giving him a look that had only one meaning: _More_.

So he bucked into her with a reckless ferocity. She whined as he sped up, bouncing her while he held her, fingers digging into the flesh of her ass, adjusting his angle to the tune of her moans. He was on the edge, ready to come apart when he felt her start to tense and pulsate around him. 

They locked eyes.

“ _Yes_ , come for me. Come for me, _sweetheart—_ ” 

She did. Her cries could fill the whole desert as she began to flutter and quake around his cock— _so good, she felt so good_ —her stomach going concave and contracting while he kept pumping into her until he couldn’t stand it anymore; _so good, so much_ . . . 

“Say my name,” he huffed, without even thinking. But once it was out there, he realized how badly he wanted it. Needed it.

She responded immediately, in the throes of climax—

“ _Ben, Ben—ah—_ ” Her voice caught and she shut her eyes, tilting her head into his neck, her words hot on his collarbone. 

One more shivery moan with his name on her lips, _Ben,_ and it ruined him. 

“ _Fuck_ , Rey— _baby_ , I—” He came hard, jerking and groaning, panting as his orgasm coursed through him like a surge in the Force. She kept breathing _yes—YES, Ben_ , while he filled her, his mind blanking; wild and shattered and whole.

Only she could do this to him. Only she could make him feel this way. _Only Rey._

He rested his forehead against hers and they shared small, soft kisses in between catching their breath together. Each motion felt delayed, like they were in a thick liquid that made their limbs heavier. She had her fingers in his hair, clutching almost too tight; but he didn’t care. He pulled out with a light shudder, letting her down so her feet touched the floor, still caging her in against the wall. Keeping her near. 

Rey tucked his hair behind his ears. He was sweating and utterly overheated. Her face and neck were flushed and she flashed him that supernova of a smile. He brought a finger up to touch one of her dimples; so sweet, so lovely. 

She was still shaky, out of breath. But she gazed up at him intently.

“Now will you help me with the cooling system?” 

He could only laugh.

——— 

Ben seemed to be in a better mood once they finally shot out of atmosphere and into hyperspace. He never looked quite at home on Tatooine; always shielding his eyes as he squinted out at the farthest dunes, as if there must be something more to a desert planet than sand. 

Rey’s life in the desert had been, if not resigned, much more accepting of the environment. Any place in the galaxy could be appreciated from far enough away; and any place could suffocate someone trapped where they didn’t ask to be. But Rey was adaptive; resilient. She had come to recognize it as one of her better qualities, and it was something that gave her a sense of pride: she had survived.

They never did quite figure out the cooling system, but they had tinkered and made a few changes so that, at the very least, it ran better. She’d finish it later, maybe if she could enlist Rose’s help once they were back on Ajan Kloss. Ben was still unconvinced that it could be truly fixed, but he admitted to being surprised that they managed any progress at all.

As they slept now with the Falcon’s engine humming nearby, it was Rey who was unsettled. She lay awake in bed, shifting uncomfortably underneath the thin blanket, with Ben’s big body next to hers.

They had been in space for days. Ben’s nightmares had persisted, but right now he was peaceful. She watched the rise and fall of his chest as he lay sleeping deeply, curled up on his side. Studied the angles and contours of his form, the way the bed sheet draped meagerly over him like it had given up any hope of covering him properly due to his size. 

Rey knew about worry, about dark visions and loneliness invading your head when the day was done, preventing any real rest. But she’d never heard cruel voices like he had. She’d never been followed by a shadow—perhaps by her own, but not by another person. Her sympathy for how Ben had been doggedly worn down over a lifetime by _her own grandfather_ , no less—her heart overflowed for him. And there was another feeling: guilt. It wasn’t her fault. But she hated where she came from. Not Jakku. She hated _who_ she came from. Who did this to him; who caused so much pain in Ben, in the lives of billions of people across the galaxy for so long. It made her sick to think of it. And she was still afraid to accept the idea. So she didn’t.

“Mmm—no . . . No—” Another fitful dream beginning, Rey supposed. She watched his eyelids twitch, eyeballs moving rapidly underneath. Not as violent as the previous ones, it seemed. Hopefully these dreams wouldn’t last. 

She leaned close to press a soft, silent kiss onto his shoulder, careful not to wake him, and slipped out of bed to get some water.

Before walking away, she sent a feeling through their bond, hoping it would reach him and calm his sleep.

_I love you._

———

He was in freefall. 

He was watching himself fall. On Exegol. His pulse raced at the sight of it. His leg began to ache at the remembrance of pain and his heart dropped to his stomach when he imagined finding Rey, wan and lifeless in the dust.

Then, he found himself alone on Exegol where he had fallen, in near-darkness and rubble, sitting on a large boulder. The air smelled like minerals and it was humid, as though there were mist seeping through the stone walls of this place, trapped in the cavernous structure.

This time it really did feel like a dream; only, he wasn’t alone. The shepherdess was there. Again.

The Togruta woman’s voice came out of nowhere.

“Remember, Ben Solo. Try to remember.”

_Not her again._

“Who are you?” he demanded.

There was a strange pause.

“A friend,” she replied, cryptic as usual.

“So you _can_ hear me.” 

“I’m as surprised as you are.” She appeared, ghostly blue and hooded, holding her staff with the loop at the top.

“Well, who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m not there, Ben. You’re here.” _Kriffing Jedi riddles._

“Very helpful.”

“You have your father’s tendency toward sarcasm.”

“Maybe it’s not my father’s. Maybe it’s just mine.”

“Maybe.”

“You—Why are showing me all these places? In my dreams—”

“I’m not showing you anything. That’s all you.”

“Enough with the riddles!” 

“The truth can sound like a riddle if you’re not listening carefully enough.”

“For the love of—” He stopped himself from cursing at this woman, this presence, and resolved to deal with her on her terms, however irksome. For Rey’s sake, if nothing else. “Fine, I’m listening. But first, tell me who you are.”

“My name is Ahsoka Tano. I knew your—”

“Grandfather.” She’d been his padawan. There was a whole history there, and he’d learned fragments of it when he researched everything he could about Darth Vader.

“Yes.”

“You’re the Jedi who was kicked out of the Order. I’ve read about you.”

“Only good things, I’m sure.” Apparently, Force Spirits could have a sense of humor. Not that Ben would know any different, since they never came to him before now.

“Whatever happened to you?” He knew it was ridiculous to ask, but he couldn’t help his curiosity by this point.

“A lot. It’s not important. At least, not for you. What’s important for you is how to get unstuck.”

“Unstuck. Unstuck? You threatened me with being thrown back into the World Between Worlds, taunted me, told me I couldn’t step off the Falcon unless—”

“You _must_ step off the Falcon. Moving forward is the only way to move backward, and sometimes that’s the true path forward.”

“Again, I find the riddles—”

“Tiresome? Me too. Force of habit.” She sat down next to him on the giant stone and removed her hood, revealing her striped montrals. “You know that you created a vergence with Rey—The Falcon.”

He nodded, half hoping she’d gloss over precisely _how_ they opened a vergence, half hoping that she’d just say it was from sex and get it over with. She seemed to prefer the former option. 

“The Force opens itself up when necessary; reaches people when it needs to, _how_ it needs to. Like a river. It will carve itself through solid stone because it must reach the ocean. 

“What you and Rey are to each other is not all that remarkable, in a way. Even though you met as enemies, even with your past—you’re still just two young people in love. 

“But what a dyad in the Force can do is unknown, unbound by all the limits others have only theorized about.” She paused, looking closely at him in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable, but he was beginning to trust her. There was something straightforward about her after all, despite all the riddles, in the way she kept badgering him. She had a mission; a goal; and he was clearly part of it.

“I’m still listening.”

“You also know that your body can’t exist outside a vergence in the Force. Not now, at least. You’ve already figured it out.” 

Ben shifted on the stone. He’d sensed something wasn’t quite right ever since he stepped through the first portal, onto the desert sands and into Rey’s arms. It had been easy to push the uncertainty to the back of his mind when they were first reunited, after he had loved her for so long from afar; now that he was finally able to smile again. 

After the second day on Tatooine, when he walked right back past an invisible boundary and into the World Between Worlds, his instincts told him to stay close by. In hindsight, he realized just how dangerous it had been to pull Rey through the portal, and felt lucky that it stayed open long enough for them both to return to Tatooine. Ben knew that vergences were unreliable; he was lucky that the portals had remained open in the first place, or that the borders and boundaries hadn’t changed out of nowhere and catapulted him into oblivion again, cutting him off from Rey for a third time.

Rey had been right about the entire homestead being a vergence—it was the one that she’d first created. And now the Falcon, too. But why, or for how long, no one could be certain. And flying the Falcon? Another worry entirely.

All these implications had only really begun to hit Ben when he had the first nightmare, when Ahsoka told him he couldn’t leave his father’s ship.

He should’ve seen it sooner.

“And you know that you don’t belong in the World Between Worlds like somebody frozen in carbonite.” So Force Spirits could have a _dark_ sense of humor, too. Or maybe that was just his own sense of humor.

“This limbo you’re in, it’s not what your grandfather intended when he gave up his individuated Force Spirit to save you. He trusted me to see it through, to make sure you survived. Only, neither of us knew exactly what would happen when he did it.”

“Sounds like an impulsive decision.”

Ahsoka laughed, nodding sagely.

“This dyad with Rey, this power that you have split across the living realm and the cosmic Force—it’s disruptive; unstable. And there will be no balance in the galaxy until you find balance; between the shadows and light. Until you and Rey are balanced across space and time.

“You cannot remain in this in-between state. It’s you and her together, everywhere . . . or nowhere.” 

“Tell me what I have to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-----thanks for reading! come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	15. how Love fled/ And paced upon the mountains overhead/ And hid his face amid a crowd of stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ben head to Ajan Kloss, where they face arrivals and departures.
> 
>   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for their eyes on this!

“Hey, sunshine.”

Ben’s hoarse voice and drowsy morning smile greeted Rey as she woke. The endearment made her feel loved and aglow, an unfamiliar but welcome feeling in the cool black void of space. They’d been traveling for days, en route to the Cademimu system, headed for Ajan Kloss—a moon with its own moons. 

She curled into his body heat, hands clasped loosely between his ample pectorals, conscious of her persistent caf-breath even though she’d cleaned her teeth only hours ago. 

“Morning, sailor.” That was their new, if somewhat arcane, joke. It involved Ben’s increasing comfort with flying the Falcon, which Rey had suspected would kick in once they were in space. 

His chest jolted inward, silently, a couple of times, in recognition. “I’d ask if you want some caf, but . . .” 

“Very funny, Solo.” She’d had a cup before bed. It didn’t affect her sleep; not like it did with Ben. He’d been such a caf-fiend for so long that he barely slept solid blocks of time until only recently, when he’d achieved some semblance of inner quiet, and of course stopped drinking caf into the evenings. And Rey seemed to wear him out. She was happy to help.

The dreams had continued, although they were different. He awoke with a start many nights, but she noticed that it wasn’t a full panic. His body wasn’t shaking. The sweat was less extreme. He’d end up comforting her, instead; saying he felt guilty for waking her—but often keeping her awake, soon afterward. She hoped it was a sign that his fraught sleep was abating, yet he was still hiding something from her. A secret, tucked away far beneath the open quadrant of their bond where surface feelings flowed.

Rey wondered what was hidden, but she didn’t intend to push him or pry beyond what he wanted to share. Everyone should expect some privacy, after all. But the worry still needled at her, nipping at her heels and asking if he was okay, is he okay, is Ben okay . . . and then, the question inevitably turned inward on her, and she didn’t like it. _Was she okay_? There were interior places she wasn’t ready to visit, thoughts of her fractured, mostly forgotten family. And it all frightened her. As with treacherous expanses of dunes that only the most expert nomadic peoples could traverse, she didn’t feel properly equipped to brave that particular stretch of desert.

She pushed those thoughts as far away as possible, always resolving to deal with them at a different time, when she was ready; later. _Always later._ Instead, she focused on the here and now. And she was happy, with Ben, in the present. It was more happiness than she’d ever expected out of life.

Ben’s free hand—the one attached to the arm he wasn’t crushing under his side—found its way to the small of her back. 

“So—‘ _Very funny, Solo’_ . . . you think I’m funny?” He started walking his fingers cartoonishly up her spine, the top half of it bare as the blanket hung loosely around her.

“No, you’re not funny. I’ve seen Holos that are funny, you’re—”

“Funny. You think I’m funny. Admit it.” 

“Not funny. Not admitting anything. You’re a nuisance, is what you are.”

“A nuisance.” His eye twitched, a tell that his brain was working her words through, trying to render a sufficiently barbed response. 

He took the cheap route, instead.

“Fine, I’m a nuisance.” He turned over, the tone of his voice inert, facing the other direction on their bed in the crew cabin. 

_So dramatic._

Rey bit the back of his neck, causing him to break his act for a moment to jolt in shock and indignation at the strength of her jaw, then she shuffled out of bed. No patience for theatrics.

“I’m going to make caf, Nuisance. You can join me if you want a cup.”

He kept up the act, feigning some silent, melodramatic affect for a few seconds as Rey wiggled into a dark gray tank top and some underwear, but by the time she was walking out of the cabin, she noticed him out of the corner of her eye, following her lead.

———

He hadn’t decided how much to tell Rey. He hadn’t decided how to tell her any of it; he was genuinely nervous. Afraid of her reaction, of hurting her. It was too much, and all he wanted was for each quiet, intimate moment they shared to last forever. But he knew it couldn’t be that way.

Ahsoka had continued to visit him while he slept, sometimes challenging him, sometimes reassuring him. She revealed a shrewd and clear-eyed view of the Sith and the Jedi, commiserating with Ben and becoming his friend. They shared a skepticism about the institutions that held a grip on the Force, both of which had long shut out the uninitiated and the ignorant.

He had made sympathetic friends before, who ended up manipulating him and almost destroying him. But this felt different; _he_ felt different, or at least—at last—changing. Nothing could hurt him now. 

Almost nothing.

If he had to leave Rey again—even if it wasn’t forever, even with the stakes as high as they were—the sense of dread was miserable. He’d had enough lonely, ugly, angry years, and on top of that, this last heartsick year where he longed for her every single day, confused as he felt and dark as his mind was. But they were together now, finally; finding a belonging, a home in each other. Leaving her meant leaving home, and it was the worst thing he could imagine. 

And he had to do it.

It wouldn’t be easy for her, either. He suspected she’d fight him tooth and nail. And while everything pointed to him going alone, he couldn’t help but wonder if Rey could help him; maybe he would be able to contact her once he crossed over. Ahsoka had said herself that their connection was a wild card. The dyad needed balance, but there was no dyad without Rey.

So, his brain was mostly occupied lately with how he would tell her. How to explain, despite not understanding all of it himself. And he’d spent the days they had left together in the most honest way he knew how: loving her. As often and in as many ways as possible.

Sometimes, that just meant being the right kind of nuisance.

Ben rounded the corridor in his briefs, too tired to bother with real clothes. He was not immune to the natural human cycles of sleeping and waking; his morning stiffness was still in near full effect. As he approached the galley, he noticed Rey wasn’t inside. The caf was brewing, but she was just out of sight. He peeked around the corner and spied a shadow against the padded walls near the main hold, arms moving against the light.

He crept closer, trying to be as quiet as was feasible with his frame, and peered around the corner to find Rey sitting atop a mat on the floor, her body switching between several interesting shapes, moving her arms and legs in the air slowly.

His mother used to do that.

“I know you’re there, Ben.” 

Kriffing thick legs of his.

He came into her field of view, and she tilted her neck around to smile at him.

 _Sunshine_.

“What you’re doing—I recognize it. My mother . . . ” He didn’t have a lot to say after those words left his mouth, but Rey understood. She always understood.

“Yeah, she taught me how. Want to join me?”

“I never really learned it.”

“Then let me teach you.”

He felt her sweet intention through their bond, saw her cute butt on the floor with her legs crossed. Who would say no to that? He wasn’t an idiot. 

She guided him through the motions—some familiar, others less so—and it worked out kinks that he hadn’t realized he was harboring, relaxed muscles that he forgot to stretch on his own. It felt good.

He didn’t want to leave her.

———

The moons of Ajan Kloss were so tiny. Part of Rey had a slight impulse to land on one, just to procrastinate. Spend a few more hours alone together. But this was their plan—her plan, technically—and they had to see it through.

She was more nervous than she had expected. It wasn’t really like her, dwelling on hypotheticals; the habit seemed to sneak up on her after leaving Tatooine. But now that she’d had a taste of life with Ben, she found her protective instincts activated in new ways. She would toss and turn some nights, and silently rehearse what she would say. Plan out little speeches to make; come up with scenarios in her head where someone would say something unkind or unfair or challenge her in some manner—and go through the ways she could respond. Sometimes she would be measured, mature. Other times, she’d cook up fantastically aggressive retorts to, for instance, Poe, who was sure to be difficult. Or she’d imagine Rose coming to her defense, or Lando embracing his nephew, daring any naysayers to question his judgement.

Yet, however many ways she could imagine it playing out, she awoke each morning to Ben’s sleepy smile, and it had a way of replacing her jitters with comfort, making room instead for resolve.

So it caught her off guard when, as they sat in the cockpit together while entering the Cademimu system, Ben suddenly shut down the engine.

“I need to tell you something.”

“What are you doing? We’re here, what are you—” She noticed how tightly his hand gripped the last of the gears as he brought the Falcon to a full stop. 

“Rey, please listen to me. I don’t want—”

“Why are you—what’s wrong? Is something wrong, is there . . .” She felt his Force signature go prickly, like a lothcat’s tail when it sensed danger. “Ben, what’s happened?”

He took a deep breath, palms on his knees as he looked away into space.

“I . . . I don’t know if I’ll be visiting Ajan Kloss with you.”

“What—what are you talking about? We’re here. It’s sorted. I don’t—”

“I mean it. There’s a . . . complication—”

“A comp—A complication with what, your nerve?” 

He looked wounded for a moment as his eyes met hers. But then his features morphed into a soft, pleading expression, and he left the piloting chair, kneeling down in front of Rey and taking her hands into his.

“I would never hurt you. I would never leave you. It’s just that—”

Taken aback, her voice devolved into a breath shaped like words. “Leave . . . leave me?” 

“—I have no choice. If I had a choice, I would never leave your side. Ever. That’s why I have to go back.”

“You’re not going anywh—you’re not making sense.” She didn’t realize her eyes had welled up until it was too late and a tear escaped down her cheeks. Some traitorous part of her knew that this was real; that it was true, what he said. 

Ben looked down at where he was holding her hands. He began slowly touching the joints of her fingers, starting with her pinky.

“When you first created a vergence, on Tatooine, and I saw you from the other side . . . I couldn’t stop to think. I had to get to you.” She felt him trying to steady himself in the Force. “But when I strayed too far from the homestead—from the vergence—when I crossed through that portal, it wasn’t some fluke.” He looked up at her with sad eyes. “I can’t leave the vergences. The homestead, the Falcon—their Force energy is powerful. It’s what’s been keeping me here in the living world. But if I want to stay with you, I have to return to the World Between Worlds. Ahsoka—”

“Who?”

“The Togruta woman, we both saw her, after . . .” She nodded, acknowledging the unspoken intimacy, and he went on. “She’s been helping me, in my dreams. Giving me guidance about what I have to do. So I can come back, for good. So we can be together.”

The truth of it began to wash over Rey like the first time she stood in the rain. Obvious, natural; but still startling. Why _had_ he vanished through the portal? She’d known something was strange, over all those hours reading ancient Aurebesh and looking at esoteric maps and theories. His existence here wasn’t complete. It had been too easy; something was unfinished. He had to go. And it would break her heart. 

And another emotion barged in front of the sorrow. She was angry.

“You’ve known this for how long, days? Weeks? When were you planning on telling me? Or did you think you’d just disappear and I’d figure it out later?” Her words came out even more sour and small than the feelings that had formed them.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Please . . .” He brought her fingers to his mouth, pressing them against his lips, eyes closed and completely still—asking for forgiveness. She wrenched her hand away, in a fit of panic and denial.

“There’s another way. There has to be another way. We’ll figure it out, I’ll talk to Maz, we can—”

“Rey . . .” his head shook slightly as he spoke, “this is it.” 

“Ben, I can’t—”

“You must.”

He brought a hand up to her cheek, brushing away a tear while his own eyes began to water, then clutched her waist and laid his head in her lap. 

_I’m sorry._

———

Rey kept saying that there might be something he was missing. Asked him to wait until Maz had a chance to weigh in. He knew she’d fight him on this, but he didn’t expect her to be this insistent that it was he who was missing some important key to the whole thing. Still, after telling her, he felt a weight come off his shoulders. But it would be the hardest goodbye he’d ever say.

Once they landed on Ajan Kloss, he could walk right off the ramp of the Falcon. And, depending on the arbitrary whims of the Force, he’d have a few steps—or maybe a few miles, or maybe just enough time to give Dameron a swift punch in the face—then, he’d vanish past the boundary of the Falcon’s mysterious vergence and face his fate on the other side of existence.

It was no small thing to be anticipating, but Ben had some idea of what he was getting into, and he had come to trust Ahsoka. Ever since Palpatine’s presence had been snuffed out for good, he felt like he had a better read on everything. A fuller, surer gut sense of things when he searched his own feelings.

But there were some things Ahsoka couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him. For one, he didn’t know how time would work. Would he fail to perceive its passing, like the period between Exegol and Tatooine? And how, exactly, would he get back to Rey? These were unanswered questions and Ahsoka did her Jedi best to comfort him without comforting him; encourage him without encouraging him . . . and she often came up short on the Jedi part, instead acting more like a regular person than a distant, emotionless sage who was above it all. He liked her.

Ben was in the cockpit alone as the Falcon came into range of Ajan Kloss. At first, the thought of flying it had made him apprehensive, if only for the fear of disappearing the second they shot out of Tatooine’s atmosphere. But he knew that there was only one way to find out if the Falcon would keep him in one piece or hurtle him into the World Between Worlds or scatter his atoms into some other, more final fate—and that was just to get into space. He’d gotten lucky, apparently. And now that they’d been flying for days, it felt pretty good to sit behind the controls. It was like he’d never left, remembering every detail and quirk down to the ship’s eccentric droid brains and temperamental compressors. He even entertained the fleeting thought that his dad’s forgiveness might’ve been his lucky charm, preventing him from being blown into a billion pieces when they made the jump to hyperspace. It was a frivolous, superstitious idea. But there was a strange comfort in allowing himself the indulgence.

Rey had gone to the fresher for a quick shower before landing. She said it would settle her. Ben sat in the pilot’s chair, scratching a little itch from his recent shave, listening to the steady hum of the engine terminal and looking out at a small, greenish-blue moon with its own moons. Someday, he’d find a little moon like that for Rey. A whole moon, just for the two of them. Someplace green, with rain and lakes and everything she found magical that others found mundane. She deserved that, if she wanted it.

He sank into the exosphere and engaged the landing gear just as she was returning. 

“Ready?” he asked as she sat down. She smelled like clean skin and soap, her wet hair tied back halfway with the rest of it dangling down around her shoulders, a few drops of water still rolling down her collarbone. He stared longer than he should have, leaving the ship’s controls unattended for a fraction of a second as he took her in, wanting to look at nothing but her until the moment he had to walk away.

She gave him a quick nod and a thin, toothless smile. He could feel the turmoil in her, the pain she was experiencing. It made his stomach turn, knowing it was because of him. Someday he’d make it up to her.

 _Someday_.

He returned his attention to the controls just in time to swoop over the Resistance base with a little more dramatic flair than he had intended. They set down in a clearing not far from the base. According to Rey, this particular spot would attract less attention.

. . . And there was a large crowd waiting at the edges of the jungle. 

Rey huffed out a clipped laugh of resignation. He loved her laugh. Every version of it.

“So much for stealth,” he remarked, hoping it would elicit more laughter. It didn’t. Her posture was stiff as she looked out the window at the group assembled before them.

Ben disengaged the forward drive and tapped the series of switches that released thruster exhaust. He didn’t open the ramp just yet. 

“I can wait. If you want. I can wait here, and we can take our time, days even. Invite Maz on board; whatever you want . . . Rey?”

She turned to him, eyes glassy, nodding.

A couple of people broke off from the crowd, walking toward the ship. Rey sighed and stood up, steeling herself, he thought, with her hand outstretched. Ben took her hand, then stood and curled his arms around her tightly. He never wanted to let go. 

———

Rey was rattled, a bit numb, like she’d been through the vaporator since Ben finally came clean about what he’d been keeping from her. But she would go through the motions of whatever this was, with this maybe-welcome party on its way. Time wouldn’t stop for them, no matter how much she wished it might. 

She stood at the top of the ramp, watching Finn and Poe as they approached. She scanned for Rose in the crowd but couldn’t make her out. Ben stood behind her, out of the line of sight for anyone except the two men walking to the ship.

Rey stepped halfway down the ramp and motioned for them to come up. They shared a quick glance, and obliged. It wasn’t until they got to the edge of the ramp that Rey could make out their expressions more clearly. Finn looked serious, but had a gentleness to his eyes that Rey felt was for her. Poe simply looked peeved. And that was probably him making an effort.

“Hey, buddy,” Finn said as he pulled her into a hug. She smiled, sinking into the warmth and familiarity of his embrace. It was even warmer than before, now that she was paying attention in a new way, aware of his Force-sensitivity. She felt his presence in the Force—steady, sincere—and found it gave her the same sense of comfort that he’d always given her. Only now, she knew that it went even deeper.

“Hey there, mate.” With her head notched over Finn’s shoulder, Rey could see Poe staring at Ben just a few feet away.

Finn released her after one more strong squeeze, then Poe made his way up to her.

“Rey, you’re back!” He affected an exaggerated, patronizing tone, and quickly, almost imperceptibly, looked her up and down, before throwing his arms around her. She reciprocated the hug, which was certainly less of a put-on than the tenor of the words that came before it. But she felt a crackle in the imposing Force signature emanating from Ben just behind her. “Mmmm, so good to _see_ you.” This was overkill, clearly, but unsurprising. Poe had a good heart underneath it all, a big heart, in fact; but he could be petty, immature. Confrontational.

Finn let out a little sigh as he turned back toward the crowd, giving a thumbs up, trying to wave them off. Poe took a different tack.

“Alright everybody. Show’s over,” he shouted to the ragtag group assembled. “Get back on the clock. First Order holdouts aren’t gonna fight themselves.” He shot a look up at Ben again. This was already tiresome and Rey didn’t have much patience to start with. Whatever political dynamics were about to unfold, none of it was important anymore. Not after what Ben had told her.

“Come inside, let’s have a chat.” She glanced back at the crowd as it was dispersing, a few people still milling around and gesturing as though they were in heated conversations. “Where’s Maz?”

Finn regarded her with a bit of a question on his face, before replying, “Back tomorrow. She had some business on Mygeeto.”

“ _Mygeeto_?” Ben’s voice came as a surprise, even to Rey. Both Finn and Poe looked like they could nearly have snapped their necks from how fast they turned their heads up to him.

“Let’s go inside,” Rey said briskly. “We’ve made some repairs to the cooling system, it’s comfortable in the main hold.” She ushered the two men up the ramp, and Ben stood there as they passed him, saying nothing, but each eyeing the other. When Rey brought up the rear, Ben swung his hand out to take hers, and they followed Finn and Poe to the dejarik table. “Have a s—”

“Okay Rey, what is this, what’s going on? What are you doing with— _him_? This guy, he’s a murderer, he’s—” Poe had no self-control, not today. Finn interrupted him.

“Can you just—For one minute—”

“Can I what? What, ignore—”

“—Just, _not_? Think you can do that? Think so? Maybe?”

“Oh, like this is okay with you? This is fine, then? Sure. This—” Poe pointed at Rey and Ben’s clasped hands, “this is great? You approve? C’mon. Bullshit.”

“ENOUGH,” she bellowed, louder than she’d intended. She dropped her volume, but meant every word on its way: “I don’t need your approval.” 

Poe was unfazed.

“Rey, look, I get it. I do! I get that you think something’s changed with this guy, you have some . . . weird . . . connection I guess? But you’re on spice if you think—” His voice suddenly caught. “If you thinkCUP—” It caught again. 

Finn was already glaring at Poe, but now his eyebrows went squiggly in confusion.

“Did you . . . did you just hiccup?”

“No, I—CUP” Poe cleared his throat. “AhemmMCUP . . . What the ffCUP—” 

Rey looked sideways at Ben, and saw a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth. He was concentrating on Poe. _Better this than choking_ , she supposed.

“Let’s have a seat,” she tried for a second time to get things under control. Finn grabbed Poe by the rolled-up arm of his sleeve, but he was defiant.

“I’m not sittingCUP down at a tableCUP with—”

“Fine, you can stand.” Rey scooted into the middle of the bench with Finn sitting down next to her on the outer edge, and Ben pulled up a small stool on the other end that made him look rather awkward and gigantic. Poe stood off to Finn’s side, balancing an elbow on top of the bench, shifting on his feet and holding his breath. 

Everyone was silent; it came as a surprise to everyone that Ben spoke first.

“You’re Finn?” He spoke quietly, keeping his calm. Finn seemed thrown off for only a moment, and recovered.

“Yeah. We’ve met before.”

“I remember. On Jakku.” 

“That’s right. On Jakku.”

The two of them appeared to be sizing each other up, but not in a threatening way. Rey couldn’t help but feel there could be an understanding that might develop between them, but didn’t want to get her hopes up.

So she was astonished, if a bit nervous, when Ben extended a hand across the table to Finn. “Ben Solo,” he said. “Pleasure to meet Rey’s best friend.” He held his hand out for a few seconds, waiting, undeterred by the palpable shock in the room. 

Then, Finn reached out and shook it.

———

There were many awkward silences, stops and starts and people talking over each other. Poe was conspicuously quiet, his contribution mostly in the way he glared at Ben while Rey explained what had happened on Exegol. She occasionally asked Ben to give details and context regarding his life, his path to darkness, his desire to live honestly and fully now. 

He wasn’t wordy; it was obvious that Finn and Poe would have many more questions. But he did seem to make some progress with them just by being candid; by admitting that he didn’t know why he survived, that he didn’t expect to be welcomed or for things to come easily—least of all forgiveness—and felt lucky beyond his due to have a second chance at life. 

“It takes some nerve showing up here,” Finn said after a long stretch of silence, “but it takes humility, too.” His voice was quieter as he went on, “And I know a thing or two about . . . changing.” He turned to Rey, placing a hand upon her hers as it rested on the table. “Listen, I’m not gonna pretend to understand what it is that happened between you two—with this bond, and the _dyad thing_. . . but I can tell that he—that Ben—is important to you. And I trust you, Rey. You know that.” 

Rey’s chest swelled with emotion. She’d told herself so many times, if they only knew; surely Finn would understand, out of anyone. And he did. She laid her other hand onto the one Finn had set upon hers, and gave it a soft squeeze. “Thank you.” She looked over at Ben, and sensed the relief and hope growing inside him. But in an instant, the idea of him leaving began to intrude on her thoughts again. He must have perceived it too, because he sent a surge of love across their bond to comfort her.

A muted scoff came from Poe in the corner. Finn craned his neck up at him, brows furrowed.

“Why don’t we go for a walk, General.” It was technically a question, but Finn didn’t phrase it that way.

Poe rolled his eyes, but in a way that was only half-assed coming from him. “Yeah, fine.”

“We can pick this up later,” Finn said. “Rey . . . Ben . . .” He nodded a goodbye to each of them. 

The two men turned to leave when everyone’s attention was drawn to the sound of footsteps coming up the Falcon. It was someone big.

“Agnnhhhhhghgghhha-ghhhhhhfgh, gnghg gngha ghnghga.”

———

_Chewie_.

The sound of his voice startled Ben, but Rey was probably the only one to notice the way the muscles around his eye spasmed for a split second. He stood up, pulse quickening, mind abuzz with a thousand things he should say, should do. He felt Rey’s eyes on him, and got the distinct sensation that she was checking on him, making sure he was all right. He was, and he wasn’t.

Chewie and Lando had always felt more like real uncles than Luke did. And they’d been with the Resistance for at least the past year; Ben knew this moment was coming, with either or both of them. But he wasn’t really ready for it. Then again, who was ever ready for a conversation with an eight-foot-tall, two hundred thirty year-old warrior-legend who might rip your arms off for killing his best friend?

“I’ll join you lot on that walk, I think,” Rey said as she stood. “But you’ll stay here, Ben. Won’t you?” The look in her eyes made him feel like he’d taken a punch to the gut. Was she worried that he’d leave her without saying goodbye? 

“Yes, I’ll stay here.”

Chewie emerged in the main hold right as the three others were leaving, and although his eyes were on Ben at first, he wrapped Rey in a hug. Something about the sight of her smiling into Chewie’s fur was impossibly tender to Ben. Rey shot one more look Ben’s way as Chewie released her, and Ben felt her familiar glow in the Force as she walked out of sight.

Then, it was just the two of them.

“Chewie.”

“Rnnnghbh.”

 _Son_. He called him son.

A few moments passed with Chewie lingering by the corridor, but then he took two large steps forward and was instantly standing right in front of, and over, Ben.

“Wyaaaaa.”

“Hi.” Suddenly, his own voice sounded like a child’s. He was intimidated, nervous. There were a million ways he could say the wrong thing. All he could come up with, the only words that he could form were, “I’m sorry.”

Chewie nodded. “Mu anghmuwaaa nnhmaw.”

His chest felt tight.

“Yeah . . . I miss him too.” It hadn’t been something he allowed himself to feel on the conscious level, but it was true. He had missed his father for much longer than he’d realized. He’d always missed him, in a way, even when Han was around during childhood—because he might be gone the next day on a job, for weeks or months. So he just missed him all the time.

“Ma wuhu muaarga.”

“I think so. I hope he does.”

“Ya wuhu muaarga . . .”

“Yes . . . and no. I’m—I’m getting there. I think.”

“Nhhhghrrrhhyya _huwu_ ya muaarga.”

“Yeah, Rey gives me peace.”

Chewie put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, then pulled him into an embrace. The sense of shock was short-lived; the feeling of forgiveness was a gift.

———

She didn’t consider herself stubborn. Tenacious, perhaps. A hard worker, certainly. And she would work to find a way to keep Ben with her. He’d agreed to at least wait until Maz returned, since she was certain Maz must have more insight. He’d called her stubborn—he said it with a grin, of course, but the word stuck with her. Maybe she was stubborn. Better to be stubborn than alone again.

So they waited for Maz to return from Mygeeto, her arrival looming ahead like a dark cloud for Rey, carrying a weight, portentous and troubling. She couldn’t shake the unease, so she just lived with its friction, sanding her down. She wasn’t sure if she was just stalling, or if she really believed that Maz would have some surprising solution or special knowledge. What she knew for certain was that her anxiety over Ben leaving made her unable to disembark the Falcon herself. People would wonder why she never returned to the base, but she explained the situation, loosely, to Finn and Poe. They were predictably confused, but seemed to register that she wouldn’t be rejoining the larger Resistance anytime soon. 

Their love-making that night was different; slow and passionate, yet tinged with a sense of melancholy. There was a deliberateness with each movement, a meditative rhythm as they breathed together, memorized each other. The bond pulsed with their love, pleasure echoing over and over until Rey couldn’t distinguish whose feelings were whose. Every time she began to drift off to sleep afterward, she awoke with a start, only to find Ben wide awake stroking her arm, her hair, keeping her close.

In the morning, they spoke very little. Lying in bed, they shared kisses and soft caresses, soaking each other up both physically and through the Force bond, until they started the caf much later than usual.

Once they got word that Maz was en route, Rey busied herself with the cooling system again. She needed to do something with her hands. Ben laid out the floor mat just outside the engine room and began stretching, practicing the movements Leia had taught Rey. He must’ve sensed that she didn’t want him out of her sight.

Finally, after he said he was just going to brew more caf, Rey was alone in the engine room. She stopped trying to untangle the bundle of cables in her hands, and instead made a study of her own fingers, touching each joint the way Ben did yesterday.

“Rey, my dear.” Maz’s voice startled her; she hadn’t heard anyone board the ship.

“Oh—Maz. Hello. I was just, I mean we were just waiting for you. Ben’s—”

“—Leaving you, isn’t he?”

“. . . How did you—”

“Talk at the base, right when I landed. You know Dameron.” The tiny woman hoisted herself down into the floor hatch with Rey. _So spry._ “He said, ‘ _Rey has some problem with Force mumbo jumbo, her evil boyfriend’s about to disappear on her._ ’ I asked Chewbacca what he was on about, so here I am.”

Typical Poe; always the gossip. “Ben is . . . much more than my boyfriend.”

“I gathered that.”

“Maz . . . I’ve seen the World Between Worlds. I’ve been there, with Ben, through a vergence.” Maz stared up at Rey, looking unimpressed, but Rey forged ahead. “You knew that it was important; you told me so weeks ago. And now Ben says he has to go back. But how do I know if he’ll ever be able to return? Isn’t there another way? You must know if there’s a missing piece to this—”

“Before Leia died, she told me that she knew the end of her path. And she walked straight toward it. I believe she is still on that journey.”

“You mean, she was—”

“—She _is_ waiting for her son. To help him. And to say goodbye.”

“How can you be certain?”

“I can’t. It’s just a feeling.” Maz reached up and placed a hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Trust the Force, Rey. And trust your—” She paused just before Ben appeared in the engine room with two cups of caf. “Ben Solo. You’ve brought us caf?” Maz eyed the cups.

“Uh, no—Yes. You can have mine.”

“Thanks,” Maz said, casually.

He handed them each a cup, before adjusting his shirt a bit weirdly. “Is there a reason why there’s a . . . delegation of people outside the ship?”

“They’re curious about you, of course. You’re a kind of celebrity. Not in a good way,” she added.

Rey was half amused by Maz’s relaxed manner with Ben, but not terribly surprised. She knew that Ben had known Maz when he was a child, and Maz had a way of being very familiar even with people she’d just met, like when Rey first met her on Takodana. Like she already knew her, already knew Finn. Already knew everything.

Ben opened his mouth to speak, but there were footsteps on the ramp and within moments, Finn and Poe were crowding into the engine room just as Rey and Maz were climbing out of the floor hatch. Poe gave Ben a sideways glance, but otherwise ignored him. Finn nodded to acknowledge him, and Ben reciprocated.

“Uhhh, yeah so, could I get my droid back? I mean . . . ?” Poe gestured to BB-8, who was in power-saving mode, lodged into the charging station.

“C’mon Poe. The droid can wait. We’ve got something to tell you, Rey. Ben, too.”

“Oh this sounds good,” Maz quipped.

“No, it’s—well, it’s something. We’ve discussed it with the rest of leadership and we’ve decided Ben can stay. For now. If he agrees to help us with the First Order holdouts.”

“That is, if he doesn’t disappear,” Poe amended. 

“Ben?” This was a chance to stall some more, Rey thought. She could admit to herself that’s what it was; own it. “Maz only just got here, maybe we could—”

“I can’t help you kids. You’ve got to figure this out on your own.” She shoved her cup into Ben’s hand. “Thanks for the caf, Solo.” 

Maz ambled out of the room unceremoniously, and Rey could hear her voice carry as she was already halfway down the ramp of the Falcon, something about “Rose! You got here just in time . . .”

Finn and Poe were still standing there, waiting. Poe had snickered at Maz’s refusal to engage further, but Finn elbowed him.

“Give us a moment, guys?” Rey hoped Ben would take them up on their offer.

“Sure. We’ll just be outside,” Finn said, patting her on the shoulder. They left Ben and Rey alone.

She set down her caf, ready to make her case, but Ben gathered her into his arms before she could begin.

“Rey, please. Please understand—”

“Why, just for a few more days; we can keep searching for answers, why not?”

“I don’t wanna be apart from you. Ever. But I have to go—”

“You don’t know that—”

“I can feel it, Rey. It’s . . . waiting for me. There’s a pull. When I step off that ramp—” This was all happening too fast. 

“You don’t have to step off, how will you get back, Ben, just—”

“You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.” He ran a hand down her arm, lacing their fingers together, leaning toward the corridor. “Walk with me . . . until it’s time to go?” His warm eyes hinted at a smile, yet his brow was knitted together just enough for Rey to see the sadness on his face. She could sense through their bond that he didn’t want this any more than she did; he was pouring everything he had into reassuring her. 

So she walked with him. Through the corridor, to the top of the ramp, from where they could see a dozen or so people standing around, including Rose and Maz and Chewie, Finn and Poe; all in various conversations until they noticed Rey and Ben. 

She wondered if he was right; if he only had until the end of the ramp and that was it. But she didn’t have to wonder for long. As they held hands tightly, walking down the ramp, she felt it: a portal, a boundary; invisible, but buzzing in the Force. 

“Ben, wait—I know you feel its pull. I sense it here, too.” She stopped midway down and Ben turned to face her, ignoring the small crowd that had gathered to size up Leia Organa’s son. “Ben,” she could only manage a whisper, “I can’t live without you.”

“You won’t have to.” 

He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her so intensely it felt like the world had fallen away. Rey laced her fingers into his hair, and melted into his embrace. She tasted a tear; she didn’t know whose. When she drew back for air, her hands slipped down to his chest. He held her wrists, thumbs brushing across her skin, still pressing soft kisses to her nose, her cheek, her brow.

She shook her head, eyes pricking, making fists into the dark fabric of his shirt. “How do you know, how . . . ” She took a sharp, ragged breath. “You’d better come back to me.”

Ben rested his forehead against hers, their tears mingling as they fell. 

“I would re-hang the stars for you. Move moons with my bare hands, wait a—” his voice caught, “a thousand lifetimes for you, Rey. You have remade my heart.” She felt the bond swell and she shuddered with emotion. “I love you, love you, _love you_. More than you’ll ever know.” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise.” 

His lips caught hers again, gentle but full of intention. He took one step backward down the ramp, still holding her hands. Then, he let go. Another step, his soft eyes locked with hers, then one more step, nodding— _I promise_ —then he was gone.

Rey dropped to her knees. People were rushing up to her, crowding her and trying to keep her upright as she stared through her tears at the empty spot where he’d just stood. 

And then she heard his voice, inside her mind but coming from him, somewhere; solid, and clear:

_Hey, sunshine._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----thanks for reading. 
> 
> If you'd like to check out my other fics, you can subscribe to my pseud on my [author page](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoeticEdda)
> 
> come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	16. Again and Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Picking up right where we left off, after Ben stepped off the ramp of the Falcon, and Rey watched him disappear.
> 
>   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to [bobaheadshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark) and [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for their eyes on this.

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love  
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,  
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others  
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together  
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again  
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.  


—Rainer Maria Rilke

It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust.

It didn’t help that they were filling with tears.

Once Ben crossed the boundary of the vergence, he had the increasingly familiar sensation of being poured like liquid back into his own body. But his senses were still attuned to the world he had just departed; the world where he left the other half of his heart. He sent a message through their bond, hoping it might reach the echo of her presence he still felt nearby, but knowing it was probably futile: _hey, sunshine._

Watching Rey weep and try to bargain with him and cling to every chance to keep him with her, he couldn’t help but feel the familiar demons of self-doubt circling. He had worked up so much resolve, such certainty. But seeing her like that, leaving her after everything they had shared, finally reaching each other after so much pain and longing and waiting and wanting—it was an emotional whiplash he could never have prepared for. 

His head was swimming, but instinct won over and his senses quickly realigned to his new environment. As his awareness went right side up again, he realized he was somewhere dark, but it was not the ethereal void of the World Between Worlds. He was inside a dusty, cavernous place smelling of ozone, with high stone walls and towering statues. There was a battle taking place above the planet. He was already in motion, running, and then he saw her.

Lightsaber in hand, striking down crimson-clad Sovereign Protectors in the Sith Citadel on Exegol— _she’s terrifying when she fights, she’s beautiful_ —Rey was dominating her opponents only a few dozen feet from the decrepit husk of Darth Sidious. _Why am I back here?_

Ben had no time to think. Red-cloaked figures were barreling toward him with weapons drawn. He felt the cool hilt of a lightsaber in his hand and everything was intuition from that point forward. Slash, parry, dodge, stab. Stay alert, stay on top, watch your back. One by one, he cut them down, and when they all lay slain on the ground, he locked eyes with Rey. 

He had only just walked away from her. Told her how much he loved her, promised he’d return, but there she was. _Why am I here again?_

The disembodied voice of Ahsoka rang in his ears. _If you feel yourself falling, dive._

He rushed up to Rey, his chest heaving from the exertion of fighting and the force of his emotions as he stood with her, ready to face the Emperor. Again.

It felt like time slowed, and he supposed it had, because he was back in another time entirely. One he did not want to revisit. If he was in the past, would things unfold just as they had before? Was he doomed to repeat this loop forever? If that was his fate, he might still return to Rey in the Tatooine desert. Just not back to the Rey on the ramp of the Falcon. _Can I live with this?_

He couldn’t watch her die again. He had promised to come back for her. But he knew how this story went, this cruel and hideous scene in the dark blue shadows of Exegol, and he had to save her. As many times as it took. He would hold her limp body in his arms and give himself to her, again and again.

_If this is my life now, it’ll have been worth it._

_All of it._

The motions were familiar. He felt Rey’s spirit wrap around his heart, sent her all the love he’d felt when he did this before, and received the intensity of her love right back—still glowing like a sun, still a revelation. They drew their weapons in unison, and in the next instant, he was on his knees, paralyzed in the thrall of the parasite that had fed off him for his entire life. His limbs locked as white-hot lightning sprayed from the Emperor’s fingertips, sucking the life energy from him and from Rey, wringing out their strength and stealing the power of the dyad. Ben gritted his teeth through the pain as it burned through every nerve ending, coursing through his body like a million lightsaber slashes underneath his skin, between his temples, through his heart.

He heard Rey’s body fall, and felt his own frame slam against the stone before everything went black. When he regained consciousness, it was his neck that moved first. Every muscle was weakened, but he strained and tightened and twisted toward Rey, finally clambering forward on one knee, dragging himself upright again.

And then he was falling.

This time, he dove.

———

_He’s gone._

After her legs gave out, her whole body felt tingly and feather-light. She heard Ben's voice, _hey sunshine_ , then the bond went silent. Voices surrounded her, people were holding her up—she was between Finn and Poe, an arm around each of their necks, with Rose at Finn’s side clasping the hand that hung limply over his shoulder. There was a long walk somewhere, a shift to being horizontal, and then she just stared at the wall. A litany of reassurances poured out of her friends’ mouths, but she couldn't respond to any of them, barely heard them. Eventually their voices slowed and stalled— _we’ll let you rest_ — _back later to check on you_ —until no one was left, and it was just Rey versus the wall.

She hadn’t realized how much time had passed in her old bunk at the base until the noises changed. The familiar sound of the jungle had transitioned from day to dusk, with a different set of creatures singing and cawing and slithering around, the nighttime choir warming up.

Rey had been frozen there since morning.

Her thoughts had been on a loop, it seemed, but then she wasn’t really thinking in the first place. She had been reduced to a single feeling: a constant, unwelcome but familiar ache that had finally faded into the background of her psyche by the time she got the urge to move her body.

Once she sat upright, the loss hit her again like a blaster to the chest. Only she wasn’t quite as alone as she felt inside. Rose sat on the other side of the small room, looking up from a datapad. 

“Thirsty?” She made her way over with a canteen and offered it to Rey. Whether out of true thirst, or being overtired, or not having the will to say anything to the contrary, Rey took the canteen and summoned a small nod of thanks before gulping down the water, cool as it hit her parched throat. “Finn will be here any minute now with some food. He went on and on about making your favorite ration hack, what’d he call it again?” Her brow furrowed.

“Bread salad.”

“Ah right, stale bread salad. We never had that in my system. But it’s a good idea, I’ve gotta admit. If there’s one thing this moon has plenty of, it’s gr—”

“—Greenery—” Rey almost felt herself smile. Rose’s face lit up with her laugh. She made a slight lurching motion toward the bed, but stopped short of sitting down. But Rey was glad of the familiarity and scooted over to make room. Rose sat down next to her.

“I think the last time we saw each other in person must’ve been right after Exegol.” She didn’t wait for Rey to respond, but appeared to make a quick calculation in her head before continuing. “Yeah, it was. After that, you were sneaking around so much, nobody could pin you down when you came and went.” There was no resentment in her voice. Rose was good-natured, and there was a steadiness, a sincerity to her that Rey had trusted from the start.

“Sorry for being so secretive.” It was all a blur, really, but she knew how it must have looked.

“Oh, you’re fine. Nobody noticed the Falcon was gone anyway,” she winked. “That was, uh . . . that was quite an introduction we got to Ben, the other day on the HoloNet.” Rey must have winced, judging by the way Rose looked at her. “Sorry, _I’m_ sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I’m all right, just . . . tired, I think.” She didn’t want to cry or break down. She just wanted to get through the end of the day. She was strong. She had to be strong.

“You’re not all right, Rey. Who could be, after what you’ve been through? If there’s one thing I know, it’s loss. And your connection with him is—well, it’s hard for the rest of us to plug into, but it’s obviously a big deal. It’s strong, this—this _bond_ you have. Wherever he is, you want to be with him. But he’ll be back, right?”

“He—We’re—I don’t know where to begin, I—” 

Rose squeezed her hand.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to.” Rose pursed her lips into a sympathetic smile. “We can talk, or we can not talk, or we can do some talking later. Just whatever you’re feeling up to.” Rey nodded, looking down at her feet on the cement floor. Rose was perceptive, and seemed to take the hint that Rey didn’t have much to say, or at least, didn’t know how to say it yet. And Rey was grateful for Rose’s patience. When they’d first met, she supposed Rose was good at being friends with other women because she grew up with a sister. But as they became friendlier, Rey realized that it was just Rose. She was kind. She was easy to like.

Rose made her way to the doorway, lingering. “It’s pretty weird for people, that Kylo Ren was Leia’s son—is, _is_ , I mean, or—” she grimaced, shook her head a bit, “that Kylo Ren _is Ben Solo_ —and now he’s here with you, and something major happened to him—well, to both of you I mean, actually, without anybody knowing about it,” she let out a little sigh, “it’s just a lot. But I’m pretty sure everyone wants to support you, even if they don’t really get it. Especially these two jokers”—Finn appeared with a tray and Poe knocked on the door jamb as if they weren't already marching right into her bunk—“Hi, guys.”

“Hey Rose, hey buddy,” Finn said. 

Rose wiggled between the two men on her way out. “I’m gonna catch up with Maz. We’re working on something . . . special. See you later, Rey. I’ll be around if you wanna, you know.” She gave Rey a warm look as she disappeared into the hallway, heading toward the cavernous main section of the bunker.

Poe couldn’t let even a few beats go by in silence. He was certainly a hothead, but Rey always got the feeling that there was a nervousness behind it, too. “Finn here, he thinks he’s some kind of chef. I told him, nobody wants to eat that green stuff, but you’ve _definitely_ got weird taste . . .” He was trying his rebel best to be agreeable. For him, that meant snark. But she appreciated the effort. 

“Made a double portion.” Finn set the tray down next to Rey, lifting the lid with a mock-theatrical touch before dragging a stool over to her cot. “Added extra kolossian weed because I know you like it tangy.” He looked at her expectantly. Rey didn’t have the heart to tell him that she couldn’t eat. She was grateful, but she just couldn’t. She hoped Finn could sense all that so she wouldn’t have to say any of it.

“Anyway,” he went on with a knowing tone, “just thought we’d leave it here, y’know, in case you’re hungry later.” 

“Thanks, mate,” she managed. 

Poe shifted his weight, hands on his hips. “Maybe we should, uh, come back in the morning. It’s getting late.” His tone was softer than usual. She got the distinct feeling that he was trying to compensate for his behavior yesterday on the Falcon.

“I could come by before zero-shift starts, if you’re awake.” Finn’s eyes were on her hands, which she had been wringing absentmindedly. “Yeah, why don’t I do that.,” he nodded, as if confirming to himself that he’d made a good plan.

Halfway into a yawn, she felt Finn’s arms wrap her in one tight, heartening squeeze, before he and Poe left the room. She was alone again, staring at the cement wall, with a stale bread salad for company. 

———

He tumbled down the upper crags of the cliff until he reached a sheer drop. The freefall felt closest to when he’d practice feint-and-swoop in atmo flying the Falcon with his dad growing up. Han would let him at the controls much to Leia’s chagrin— _kid’s no dummy, Leia, he’ll be fine_ —and by age nine he was getting so good at it that his dad even let him try it above Eadu during one of its notorious storms. If only they’d known why he loved the thrill of his stomach lurching so hard; the physicality of it, pulling the gears up at the last minute when your adrenaline was highest—it was one of the few things that got him out of his own head. Which was a crowded place to be. 

Ben had let his thoughts run away from him for only a moment when he hit the ground with a thud. As he regained his orientation, his heart raced, panic setting in. _I have to get back to Rey._ He scrambled to his feet and spun around, making a quick scan of the environment—an eerie black field of nothingness, with long, thin light beams that seemed to stretch forever; there was no horizon, just like space. _Back in the void._ Or maybe he had never left it. Maybe Exegol had been pure illusion.

“Well look what the lothcat dragged in.” 

She came out of nowhere, staff in hand.

“Ahsoka.”

“Ben Solo.” 

Her presence was calming, allaying his fears that he should’ve been climbing out of a pit and up a cliff in the dark. If Ahsoka was here, if he could not only hear her but talk with her, this must be real. Exegol seemed safely in the past now. “I thought you’d be waiting for me when I walked off the Falcon. Have you been busy with other wayward Force-users?”

“You really are his grandson, you know that?” she said drily. “I’m here now. When you need me.”

“Why do I— _what is that?_ ” An odd bird was perched on her shoulder: green feathers, tufted tail, with a round body and a stubby beak. 

“You mean _who_ is that. Just a friend of mine.”

“Oh, well, that explains it.”

“Walk with me, Ben.”

He looked around at a whole lot of nothing. “To where?” 

Ahsoka smiled sideways as she led the way with her staff. “Your disposition has improved since you died. Or maybe it started before that.”

“Did I? . . . Die?”

“Yes and no. Your grandfather sacrificed his presence in the Force for you, but with your mother, things are less clear. It seems that she’s stuck, just like her son.”

“My mother—I don't understand.”

“Think of it this way. The Living Force and the Cosmic Force are in each of us. When we’re on this side of existence, it’s all Cosmic. Spirits untethered to the Living Force can retain their individuality, after a process of sorts. That’s what your grandfather gave up for you.”

Sometimes talking to Ahsoka was like having a datapad downloaded directly into your brain, but there was no driver installed to run the program to read it.

“But when your mother died, she didn’t pass into the Force right away. She’s not _here_ , to put it simply. She was so strong with the Force that she hung onto just enough life energy to delay in joining with the Cosmic Force, and then she gave you that energy, from lightyears away. Anakin saved your spirit, but your mother saved your life.”

Ben had so many questions, but he couldn’t find the words for a single one. 

“Neither of them knew what the other was doing,” she went on. “They never knew each other to begin with, of course. But they collaborated to save you. Without realizing they had done it together. Father and daughter.”

It felt like the wind had got knocked out of him. Guilt flooded his thoughts; it wasn’t logical, but he felt it all the same. “If my mother’s not _here_ , where . . . None of this makes any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t, not on its own. It’s up to you. You have to make sense of it.” The green bird gave an affirmatory squawk. “Like that, for instance.” She pointed her staff in the direction of the nearest portal. Its outline looked as though someone had taken a tiny leaking star and dragged it into the shape of a circle, leaving a thin trail of light; luminous ink on a black canvas. Within the outline, he saw through to a dim underground cavern carved out of rock, with a pool of water at the bottom and a person emerging from it.

_Rey._

She was on Ahch-To, in the cave she had told him about, that night by the firelight. His heart started pounding; the impulse to get to her, to make contact overrode all reason. 

“You can’t go to her. It’s in the past. You cannot change it.” Ahsoka had an odd quality to her voice, like she was reading from a script.

“You don’t understand. She needs me, she was in pain that night, I have to . . . to do _something_ , to help her, just speak to her. Please.”

“If you change the past, you can’t count on the future. And your future is together, with her.”

“But—” Rey was walking toward the portal. As she neared it, the circular outline of the vergence began to spin rapidly, bordered by figures of sprinting wolves. She stopped to raise her arm, then snapped her fingers in an experimental gesture. _She looks so lovely, wet from swimming._

_She looks so lonely._

Ben moved closer to the circle, stepping slowly with Ahsoka not far behind. She said, “Remember,” and he nodded. 

“Just for a second, just to be near her.” 

He could’ve sworn Rey saw him approaching. But she couldn’t have, could she? Not unless he chose to go through the portal, which would have changed everything that already happened since that night. He remembered how she told him about a mirror cave, hoping to see her parents. Maybe she was looking for them. Maybe she was just staring through the vergence at nothing. Maybe this was all a test, another illusion. 

They both stepped closer, and it took his every last shred of self control not to reach through and gather her in his arms.

She stared intently at him, and he couldn't shake the feeling that she recognized him through the vergence. He knew from experience, from when he pulled Rey through the portal on Tatooine, that a person on the other side couldn’t see through to the Vergence Scatter. But the way she looked at him made his hair stand on end. _Somehow, she knows._

Rey slowly moved forward, as if she might cross through the veil. Ben mirrored her movement, drawn to her as ever. The closer their bodies came, the more of a pull he felt in his chest— _go to her_ —an instinct that wanted to overwhelm his whole being. She reached a hand out to the portal, and he watched her fingertips almost break through the thin film separating time and space between them. He lifted his hand to meet hers, but caught himself, stopping his fingers just short of touching hers, straining against the urge to be with her. 

She whispered something he couldn’t understand. As soon as he felt himself on the verge of losing control, he wrenched his hand from the portal. As Ben was backing away— _she can’t see me, she mustn’t_ —he turned around to reassure Ahsoka that he wouldn’t go through, but the woman was gone. When he looked back at Rey, she was kneeling, eyes full of tears. Then she got to her feet and began walking in the opposite direction, making her way through the cave again, farther and farther away. He saw the outline of her body slip underneath the water, watched her swim up to the mouth of the cave and climb back to the stone hut where they would later see their future together by the fire.

The portal shut suddenly and vanished. Ben dropped to his knees, anguished at the loss of Rey’s presence. 

_I love you._

He had the sudden sensation of a pressure change in his ears.

_“Ben?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----thanks for reading. If you'd like to check out my other fics, here's what I've got cooking:
> 
> [After You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23659306/chapters/56792071), a fantasy AU loosely based on the wizard-apprentice dynamic from Naomi Novik's Uprooted with nature, magic, and nature-magic, also velvet 
> 
> and
> 
> [The Lazy River](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25219195/chapters/61127752), a fluffy, light-hearted summertime story set in a suburban Virginia waterpark, with a **_top secret twist_**
> 
> come say hi on twitter [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


	17. Careful the tale you tell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's frustration at being separated from Ben yet again leads to a series of revelations about what's happening--both now, and perhaps in the future.
> 
>   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been taking me longer to update than I would like. I really appreciate readers sticking with me through a long process! Your comments and encouragement go a long way. <3
> 
> Big thanks to [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) for taking a look at this.

The light from the sky beat down on her and the glare from the sand reflected up at her, producing a strange sort of claustrophobia that only desert people truly understood. _Nothing new under the suns._ Rey used her arm wraps to dab the sweat beading above her brow as she turned and trudged toward the low-domed dwelling, sunlight pressing against the back of her neck.

_This isn’t real. Have to wake up._

She roamed around the old pourstone structure, ran her hand along its smooth masonry. This place felt familiar, but distant. Soon she was descending the steps to a sunken courtyard full of time in the form of wind-swept sand, haphazard dunes leaning against the curved walls. _A few more decades and this place will disappear completely._

There was a knapsack slung around her torso, and she reached inside. Her fingers found metal, cool to the touch. Three lightsabers.

She placed the hilts of two of the sabers onto a clay-colored cloth and folded them into a parcel, even tying it with a leather strap, then climbed back up the stairs where she found a waiting BB-8. She did what she meant to do; although, she didn’t know what she was doing. She intended it, and yet she wasn’t herself so she couldn’t have any intention. _Not real, not real._ Kneeling to the ground and placing her fingers into the top layer of fine silt, Rey watched the desert swallow up Anakin Skywalker and Leia Organa’s lightsabers, sand sucking them down and enveloping them underneath layers of sediment while the surface filled in fine and smooth again, as if nothing had happened.

_This is nonsense, it’s a dream, wake up._

She stood, brushing the dust off her knees, and heard the tinkle-jangle of bells and the dull stamp of hooves on sand. Rey turned toward the soft sounds just as an ancient, leathery-skinned woman approached with an etobi following a lazy lead. The woman stopped as she neared the little desert homestead, and stared rather blankly at Rey.

“There’s been no one for so long. Who are you?” the woman asked, a pink-trimmed headscarf hanging loosely around her face and limp, white wisps of hair framing her features in the calm evening air. 

“I’m Rey.” She had answered, it seemed. She was Rey, but she was someone else. She was here, on Tatooine, but here was somewhere else. 

“Rey who?” _Rey who, Rey who? Who even asks that sort of question, in the middle of a barren salt flat, to a stranger? Nobody cares; not in this environment, not anywhere. Nobody._

_Need to wake up._

A soft, shimmery light caught the corner of Rey’s eye. She glanced over to where two ghostly figures appeared: a man and a woman, each draped in white robes, nodding placidly as if in assent to a request. Luke and Leia appeared to be giving their blessing for something, but they looked more like statues than themselves. A peculiar and unbidden thought entered Rey’s mind, that their intent was for her to use the Skywalker surname as an answer to the woman’s question. Whatever for, she couldn’t imagine. _Wake up, this is nonsense._ “Rey Skywalker,” she heard herself reply.

_Rey Skywalker—Rey Skywalker_ —it echoed in her ears, the memory of her own voice morphing into a strange song played backwards. It sounded wrong. Like a mistake. Like a farce.

The woman’s face didn’t change; the name must not have registered. Then, she cocked an eyebrow drily before shaking her head and pulling the etobi’s harness, jangling along the way. 

Rey’s control over her own thoughts came and went, but as her real memories bobbed to the surface of her consciousness, an onslaught of emotion kept her from thinking straight. She was on Tatooine, where she had finally wept in her loneliness, begun to grieve Ben after Exegol, then found him walking toward her in the desert. Only hours ago, she had watched him back off the ramp of the Falcon, disappearing once again into uncertainty. Now she was here at the Lars homestead, but she wasn’t. She was asleep, but she wasn’t. 

In her hand, she held a thick-handled saber hilt with leather wrappings over waxed canvas that looked like someone had been working the weapon, training with it for some time now. It was unmistakable; she’d recognize the object anywhere: the saber had been constructed from her staff. Her own lightsaber, that she had crafted herself.

She twisted a dial with her thumb to ignite the saber. The laser beamed golden like the sun on Jakku, like the glow of a lantern in a dark alley or a beacon through thick clouds. A sense of pride collided with a sudden pang of sadness; she dearly wanted to show Ben.

Rey gazed out at the horizon, standing with the little droid she’d met a year ago in another desert, feeling more alone than ever. Then, the wind picked up, and just as abruptly, it went still and silent. 

_“I love you.”_

She opened her eyes with a start and jumped out of bed, bare feet hitting the cool concrete floor.

_Ben?_

———

The floor gave out underneath him, and Ben was falling in the darkness for what seemed like hours before hitting a solid surface again. But the fall and the thud caused an even longer blank spot in total blackness and silence.

When he came to, his head felt heavy and thick like it had taken a blow. He was lying on his back. Getting his bearings after a steep dive was becoming a strange habit. It never felt normal, exactly, but he was less surprised each time. Even so, it was disorienting. The deep black void of the Vergence Scatter had vanished, replaced by sunshine, a salt breeze, the scent of grass. He rubbed his temples, squinting from the light. 

_It was her. I heard her voice._

But Rey herself was nowhere to be found. Instead, the telltale chatter of a gaggle of children came from nearby. Ben shifted in the grass to the sight of a group of padawans congregated around a pile of rocks. 

“You have to _become_ the rock. Not just look at it, or feel it, but be it.” The voice seemed familiar, but he couldn’t make out who it was through the whooshing of wind against the terraced bluff overlooking an ocean.

He was propped up on his elbows downslope from the group, watching the children from a dozen meters away. Homogenous beige and brown robes made all the kids’ features and scales and skin colors stand out, but one human boy with jet-black hair stood a head taller than the rest of them. A sense of dread flooded Ben’s chest. The heaviness was how he imagined it would feel to drown in thick bacta water, a particularly grim thought he used to obsess over as a child. The black-haired boy was so still, unlike the other rambunctious kids. He wasn’t just taller, but older. More mature, maybe.

_It’s me._

The boy turned his head toward the ocean below the cliff and Ben caught a better look at his profile. Strong nose, wide shoulders but still bony, cowlicked mop of black hair . . . but this boy had a squarer jaw and cheeks full of tiny freckles. 

A different kind of panic set in. 

_It’s my son._

_It’s—our—son._

The group of kids started migrating along the windswept grasses, all of them walking single-file as they balanced rocks in midair. Impressive for anyone, let alone padawans. Who was teaching them? The leader was at the head of the group, but Ben still couldn’t see who it was from his angle as he watched this queue of children descending down the sloped side of the bluff.

Peering past the winding path and down toward an especially large, flat terrace jutting out from the mountainside, Ben spied a village. There were huts of varying sizes, bigger buildings too. People were milling around, talking, walking, exchanging what looked to be baskets of gifts and foodstuffs, although most of them were beginning to crowd around a small spaceport with an eclectic collection of ships docked in neat lines.

As the kids neared the village, they broke off from their little rock-levitation-march, letting the stones topple down the cliff face, laughing as they dispersed to meet up with what must’ve been their parents. One by one, as each family was reunited, they boarded their ships and took off until only a few kids and adults remained in the village as the sun began to set.

The tall boy, _our boy,_ stayed close to the teacher of the group. Finn.

He put his arm around the boy and they walked toward a large hut, where a couple of littler kids ran out with paintbrushes and paper in their hands, greeting their brother and almost toppling him to the ground. _Their brother._

The idea of having his own family had only ever been abstract to Ben, and never the warm, pleasant way it was portrayed in Holos or other nonsense. It had rarely crossed his mind anyway, prompted as it usually was by Snoke goading him about his bloodline, bringing up the Skywalkers and belittling him for being a Solo, eliciting fresh resentment and self-loathing each time. But the thought of a family with Rey hit him differently—a potent cocktail of terrifying and, to his surprise, exciting. It could be a chance to build something good with her, together. Something full of possibility. 

Ben stalked along the windy cliff-face, not wanting to interrupt this scene from . . . was it really his future? His son’s future? They all looked happy; wholesome and right. His eyes began to prick with tears. The voices of the little ones carried through the breeze to Ben’s ears, “mummy’s home soon, c’mon let’s make her a present, c’mon can you draw the speeder?” The tall, serious boy flashed a giant smile and messed up the brown hair of his siblings—twin girls—before exchanging a friendly nod with Finn and following the excited girls as they laughed into the hut.

Ben’s eyes welled up even fuller when he realized where he’d heard that exact laughter before. But his attention was peeled away by the sound of rales punctuating long inhalations, paired with an all too familiar shuffle, asymmetrical and slow. 

_What’s he doing here, what the f—_

He whipped his head around only to see a crowd of padawans again, but these kids were all familiar to him. They were his own padawan cohort, and most of them were waiting around in the grass while Luke coached each one individually to control the movement of objects. Ben glanced around for his younger self. Sure enough, he was off to the side, lanky and sour-looking.

And Snoke was hovering over him. Like a vulture. No, like the predator he was. 

None of the other kids appeared to notice, nor did Luke. It seemed Snoke was only visible to young Ben, and old Ben. Snoke slipped his arm around the shoulders of Ben’s younger self as the boy stared at the ground. Ben thought he might vomit from the sight. His face went hot with anger, just as the boy standing with Snoke looked up and caught Ben’s eye, staring straight at him without blinking: freckles again. Square jaw. Rey’s eyes. 

_Not him, don’t you dare touch my son you fucking monster—_

The boy smiled weakly at Ben. Snoke turned his attention over to where Ben was standing, casting his revolting sneer in Ben’s direction, then vanished.

He had the impulse to run to the boy, tell him not to listen to Snoke; urge him to alert his Master, or tell his father or mother, anybody, that he was in danger. When Luke—no, it was Finn again—called out from the ridge, the boy looked away in response. 

Ben made a calculation. He couldn’t talk to his son. No matter how much he wanted to warn him, no matter how much he already loved him, he knew he had to leave him alone. He wasn’t sure what any of this was; the real future? An illusory vision foisted on him by the Force? Even though Snoke was dead and none of this could be possible, he was scared and worried for this boy. But some weighty and blunt instinct deep within kept him from intervening. He didn’t need Ahsoka to tell him what would happen if he did; real or not, he just knew it wouldn’t be right. 

And there was something else, beyond the worry about altering events: he trusted his son. He would be all right, this boy. He could take care of himself or tell the right people if he needed help; he’d figure it out. Ben’s own parents hadn’t trusted him, but he would trust his own boy. _Our boy_. He could let go. He would do it for his son, for his son’s mother, for them all.

Before the boy could turn back in his direction, Ben made the split-second choice to make himself scarce. It wrenched inside his chest to leave, but if some part of this future was true— _I hope it’s true_ —the boy shouldn’t encounter his own father in the middle of some Force fever-dream. Ben eyed the water below, used his best estimation as a pilot to gauge how far of a fall it would be, considered wind speed and gravity—

So he dove off the cliff and into the ocean.

———

_It was him. He was with me, I felt him._

She was sweating even in the climate-controlled cruiser, pacing in her bunk. There was usually some level of minor activity at all hours, a muted thrum of busy-ness through the energy of everyone on board and in the area. But this night was particularly quiet, the only noise coming from the Tantive IV’s generator, quietly humming to keep the pathway lights on inside the hangar and the bare minimum number of workstations operational. Rey pulled on some breeches and boots before heading out into the cavernous bunker, unsure of where she was headed, but certain she had to go somewhere. 

Clipping Leia’s lightsaber to her waistband out of habit, she made her way out to the central cave of the limestone hangar, low lights guiding her way. The path wound around ancient tree trunks and allowed her to forgo eye contact with the few people manning sensor stations on nighttime shifts. She approached the mouth of the cave complex, emerging into the clearing where the Falcon usually sat parked. No one had bothered to bring it back yet, even though it was only a few hundred meters from the main landing zone. _People must really be feeling comfortable._ Rey wasn’t sure that was a good thing. Comfort could be dangerous. Feeling safe was a liability. She had finally experienced moments when she’d forgotten that hard truth a few times, warm in Ben’s embrace, drunk with love under the stark starlight of Tatooine. But it was a lesson she had learned very young.

She trod out into the jungle, in the direction of where she used to do drills.

_I want to move, I want to . . ._

_Run._

Her feet were way ahead of her. She let the sweat build, relished the familiar warmth of her muscles reconditioning to the exertion. Rey emptied her mind and opened her eyes to the terrain as she tore a pathway through the vegetation, heading for the deep canyon in the heart of the jungle. Whoosh crunch, swish crack. Leaves and branches yielded to her, brittle in spots and rotted in others after their journey from atop the sun-drenched trees to the damp forest floor. 

She panted through the thickest patch of jungle, racing toward the canyon yet unable to fully enjoy the release of exercise through her frustration at being connected with Ben and then so suddenly cut off again. It was he who had awakened her from that strange dream, she was sure of it, even if he was in that unknowable place between worlds. For the shortest moment in her bunk, she had truly sensed him, but then Ben’s Force signature went silent once more.

Rey had been left alone to wait before. Her parents never came, but Ben did. He gave her his life and returned like a miracle in the desert before disappearing again, first by accident and now by design, to right his existence. She understood it, she accepted it. But she hated it. _Sick of waiting._ Ben said he had to go alone, that Ahsoka was waiting for him. But he never said Rey couldn’t follow after him. The problem was, she didn’t know the way.

As she ran through the brush, her eyes pricked from the frustration of not knowing how to get to Ben; distress churned into anger at the dark memory of Sidious who caused all this suffering; anger sparked into rage as the story of her parents’ murder invaded her mind. Rey ignited her lightsaber and began slashing every vine or broad leaf in her path during the final few dozen meters before reaching the canyon edge. Growling, she leapt across it, propelled by blind fury and pain and the Force, vaulting over to the other side. There stood a great tree, thicker than ten humans, with sinewy roots twisting outward. _Yet another obstacle._ She kept running up the side of the tree, hacking at its trunk as she climbed, bellowing at nothing, pouring out her anger from her throat into the humid night air. 

The tree’s thick boughs fell one by one as she wrought destruction upon its branches, until her feet had nowhere to rest and the tree came down, collapsing as Rey jumped off to the side. 

What had she done?

The lightsaber suddenly felt so heavy in her hand. She regarded it for a moment, then tossed it onto a pile of leaves as she neared the tree. Still huffing, Rey placed both hands on its trunk. She allowed her mind to go quiet, listening for the Force between heartbeats, waiting for the soft resonance of creation to sound. Like when she healed the vexis serpent on Pasaana. When she healed Ben. Tears flowed down her face as the tree began to repair itself, boughs lifting off the ground and fusing to the trunk again, exposed green pith reuniting with joints, gnarls and whorls spiraling into rounds once more; the architecture of nature transforming back to its humble beauty beneath Rey’s touch.

“I knew it was you.” His voice came out of nowhere, the sound of the jungle retreating as their bond opened, and Rey startled away from the tree. _Ben_. She spun around, eyes darting until they settled on him, standing across the gorge. 

“Ben? You’re—how did you—” His presence in the Force had an immediate physical effect on Rey, like slipping into warm water. They stared at each other across the expanse for a moment and Rey’s thoughts flashed to when they had stood on opposite sides of a chasm before, in the snow, as Ilum cracked open. 

Ben started along the tree trunk that bridged the canyon gouged into the jungle. “I don’t know, I . . . heard screaming.” His approach was leisurely, footsteps veering off the trunk, taking a more direct angle in his approach to where Rey stood. He walked coolly through the air as if there were no canyon below him. Rey’s heart lurched; he was indeed there with her—but not fully. Whatever was happening here was beyond her understanding.

As he stepped onto Rey’s side of the canyon, they went to embrace, but their bodies didn’t meet. It was nothing like the hut on Ahch-To. They simply walked through each other. Rey huffed in anger and Ben’s face was lined with disappointment. She could sense him in the Force, knew that this was real, not an illusion or a vision. But their Force bond was a mystery to both of them in the living world, and it appeared only more obtuse and unknowable as it was now split between here and the place Ben was in.

They stood there for a moment in tacit acknowledgement of the less than ideal circumstances. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked, peeking just behind her.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

His eyes narrowed and his dimples emerged, then his smile softened and disappeared. She couldn’t read his face for a moment, then he said, “You’re all sweaty. You look pretty.”

Rey felt herself blush. Their intimacy had an intensity most people would never experience, and over the last few weeks, they’d shared more and more casual, quiet moments in between meeting a voracious physical need for each other—but he was flirting with her. And even while it was from beyond the material world, something as simple as “you look pretty” made her blush and tilt her head away for a moment, only for her eyes to land on the half-healed tree.

“I’ve made a mess. Just trying to clean it up.”

“I can see that. Don’t let me keep you from your work.” 

“You can see the tree? I thought—”

“Just you, and this tree. Everything else is black. You’re”—he glanced around for a moment, crinkling his brow—“You’re here with me, in the Vergence Scatter. At least, that’s how it looks. You, me, and the tree.” 

“Snoke isn’t alive to connect us anymore, how can this still be happening?” She caught his slight twitch at the name. “Sorry, Ben, I—”

“It’s fine, don’t—this is something new. But I’d put credits on you causing it. By trying to heal this tree.” 

“Like with your kyber crystal.” 

If this had opened a vergence, and now their Force bond, what else could it do? Rey placed a hand back on the trunk, dropped her eyelids, and allowed the Force to flow through her and through the tree. Then, she felt a large hand upon her own. When she opened her eyes, it was to the sight of Ben healing the tree with her, his hand solid now, clasped over hers. The Force sang with life energy, with mystery and creativity. Ben’s gaze was fixed on Rey as the tree completed its regeneration. When it was finished, they were both winded. Rey wouldn’t allow herself to hope that this would bring him back; she had sensed that this was temporary, unusual, an artifact of their connection as a dyad. But they were touching now, one person in the living world and one somewhere outside of it. And neither of them seemed to want to let go.

“Do you remember what you saw, what you heard on Ahch-To,” he asked, “when I took your hand?” 

“I remember everything. Parts of our future, images, sounds . . . It didn't all make sense, really, but yeah, I remember.” 

“Rey, I just saw something, someone—well, there were three of them . . . it was in the future, or a possible future—what’s—” He had barely lifted his hand off hers when he looked suddenly worried—“The tree, it’s gone . . .” and his body started going transparent.

_No, not yet. Please don’t go._

“Ben, wait, I’m coming after you—”

“Giggling girls, Rey, did you hear them . . . ” He was disappearing as the Force bond weakened and thinned. 

That laughter was as clear in her memory as if it had happened yesterday. “Yes, I heard them, little girls.” When his form completely vanished, she could still hear his voice, same as before. It was only their thoughts that connected them now, and that would soon close off, too. She could feel it fading, slipping away.

_I saw them. They were ours._

She gasped softly. _Our . . . children?_

_They were beautiful, Rey. Beautiful. Just like you._

The sound of the jungle returned. Rey was certain now that this wouldn’t be the last time they connected across the unknown. She would hear his voice again, see him and touch him. But after tonight, it was a matter of listening differently. And she intended to find him, meet him where he was. They would be coming home—together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----thanks for reading. If you'd like to check out my other fics, here's what I've got cooking:
> 
> [After You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23659306/chapters/56792071), a fantasy AU loosely based on the wizard-apprentice dynamic from Naomi Novik's Uprooted with nature, magic, and nature-magic, also velvet 
> 
> and
> 
> [The Lazy River](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25219195/chapters/61127752), a fluffy, light-hearted summertime story set in a suburban Virginia waterpark, with a **_top secret twist_**
> 
> \-----come say hi on twitter! [@NoeticEdda](https://twitter.com/NoeticEdda)


End file.
